Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-03-13-Speech-2-050"
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"en.20010313.6.2-050"2
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"Mr President, the proposal for a directive defining a European temporary protection regime in the event of a mass influx of displaced persons from third countries replaces the proposals for joint action on the same subject that we discussed in 1997 but that were not implemented because of what I regard as justified reservations on the part of several Member States.
Unfortunately, although today's proposal is more flexible on certain points, it remains open to several serious criticisms. The first is that to introduce this temporary protection comes down to creating a second status. That status is parallel to the status of refugee, of beneficiary of political asylum recognised under the 1951 Geneva Convention, but much broader than that. The beneficiaries under this new system would not just be persons who satisfy very specific criteria for the grant of political asylum but also very broad categories of third-country nationals who apparently had to leave their country of origin for a variety of reasons.
Article 63(2) of the Treaty of Amsterdam does indeed provide for the introduction of this kind of regime, but it refers only to temporary protection. The Commission proposal, however, although theoretically confined to protection for not more than two years, risks creating
situations very likely to continue for longer than that, since provision is made only for the voluntary departure of the persons concerned. We regard that as a serious defect of the Commission's proposal.
Our second major criticism is that although the States must give their assent to the physical allocation of the protected persons – which represents some progress over the earlier version – the new text seems, in fact, to absolve the Member States of their responsibility. This problem could have been avoided if the basic decision by the Council to launch the temporary protection regime had been taken unanimously. But the Commission proposal only provides for a qualified majority decision, which, in our view, was not legally necessary and basically seems quite inadequate for such a serious issue."@en1
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