Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-02-28-Speech-3-020"
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"en.20010228.3.3-020"2
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"Mr Medina Ortega, I shall give you all the details necessary. Article 6(1) to which you referred, stipulates that the request presented to the President must be sent from the competent Member State authority. However, the request to which you have referred raised a very serious problem. As you know, we are fully informed on these matters of waiver of immunity because we receive a great many of them with regard to all countries. Indeed, I have checked the facts of the matter, and all these requests, with the exception of those originating in Portugal, have always been sent by a government body, be it the Minister for Justice or Foreign Affairs. The case of Portugal is exceptional; requests from that country may be addressed directly by the judicial authority.
In this instance, the request was received directly from the Supreme Court. I immediately made enquiries to check the position – I was not in Brussels at the time, but I asked for verification immediately – and we noted that, several years previously, a request for the waiver of immunity had been received, also from Spain, but this had been sent to us from the Spanish Government, which conveyed the request of the Supreme Court.
Since there were no new developments in Spanish legislation between these two dates – 1990 and 1999 – I thought there was a significant problem of eligibility. As you know, Mr Medina, we are in a good position to know that we have to be very careful because European case law does not always follow us, and we must always act in a very disciplined fashion. I have therefore asked the head of my private office, who was present in Brussels at that time, to write to the Spanish authorities to find out whether the president of the Supreme Court was, in the eyes of Spanish law, the competent authority, in application of the regulation, to send us this request. I have not, to date, received any response.
I now understand better why I have not received a response. Reading the Spanish press, I have seen that the problem was a very complicated one, that there was unquestionably a difference of opinion between the judicial authorities and the governmental authorities.
The question, and it is a far-reaching one, as I am sure you can see, is whether the European Parliament can decide between the two arms of Member State authority, the judicial authority and the governmental authority, in order to determine which of the two is the competent body. I understand that the coordinators of the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market are going to look into this matter in March. Personally, I think this is excellent, but once again we must act with the utmost discipline in accordance with the texts of both national legal systems and European law."@en1
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