Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-03-13-Speech-2-062"
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"en.20010313.7.2-062"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, this morning Commissioner Vitorino complained that he had to comment on an initiative that was by no means of his own making. He is going to be faced with the same problem again, because we are now talking about a French initiative. It is concerned with mutual recognition of decisions on the expulsion of third-country nationals and it is another case demonstrating that there are good reasons for reserving the power of initiative solely to the Commission. It is evident that the Commission is in a better position than the individual Member States to promote the Community interest, whereas individual Member States tend to concentrate on their own interests. So this is another piece of evidence that suggests we should press for the Commission to have a monopoly on legislative initiatives.
This initiative dates back to the end of the French Presidency, at a time when the Presidency's achievements were threatening to look very slim indeed. So they rapidly came up with a whole string of initiatives just before the final whistle, in order to improve things somewhat, and they were all pretty rushed. I would recommend those of you who take an interest in legal matters to compare the first and second drafts. The first draft is all good will and politics, whereas the lawyers have crawled over the second draft and turned the whole thing into something that could reasonably be called a legislative initiative. In other words, there is a very considerable difference in the legislative quality of the first and second drafts of the initiative.
Furthermore, the legal objective of the initiative is now quite clear. It quite simply means that an expulsion decision made, say, in Paris, would be binding throughout the Community. That makes sense – after all it would be complete nonsense if a decision made in Paris could be appealed against in Helsinki or in Berlin or in any other Member State within the area of freedom, security and justice. But the Community needs a legal basis for such action. A legal objective is no replacement for a legal basis.
That is a lesson we have just learnt from the European Court of Justice's ruling on the tobacco advertising directive. In that case too there was a legal objective which very much deserved to be debated, but the ECJ made it clear that there has to be a legal basis in the European treaties. The Committee on Citizen’s Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs twice unanimously rejected the French initiative on the grounds that there was no such legal basis. The French Government based its initiative on Article 63 of the EC Treaty, where you will find a legal basis for a European expulsion law. That is not quite the same thing as mutual recognition of decisions at national level concerning expulsions. A Community expulsion law would be a directive in which the Community lays down a proper legislative procedure stipulating the circumstances in which an illegal immigrant can be expelled and possibly even deported. However, in this case we are talking about all the Member States mutually recognising expulsion decisions and other similar decisions reached in accordance with their respective national legal frameworks. That is quite a different kettle of fish. As we have been rather more careful recently about whether the European Union and in particular the Community aspect of it can do everything it would like to do, we in the Committee on Citizens' Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs were firmly of the opinion that while we support the legal objective pursued by the initiative, we can see no legal basis for it. We therefore propose that this initiative be rejected.
At the same time we have immediately presented a suggestion for solving this problem. It is perfectly clear that this difficult situation could be resolved if there were a European expulsion law. So the inevitable consequence of this process is that we call on the Commission to bring forward a proposal for a directive creating a European, a Community expulsion law, which is also binding within the Community. That would solve all the problems associated with this initiative."@en1
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