Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-03-13-Speech-2-078"
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, all the studies and statistics on major social emergencies stress that the right to security is one of the greatest demands of the European citizens. Crime, in its most varied forms, is rightly perceived by our citizens to be not just a threat to physical safety
but a genuine, ever-increasing, intolerable threat to the freedom of movement, the freedom to work and the freedom to live a normal everyday life. This psychological concern has led to an increasing lack of confidence in the institutions and increasing mistrust of other people. This sense of insecurity affects absolutely everybody: companies, families and individual people, particularly women, the elderly and children.
In this context, it is often very difficult to separate large-scale organised crime, large-scale criminal phenomena, and what is known as small-scale crime; this is particularly true of urban areas, one example being drug distribution and drug pushing.
Mr President, there was a time when the first thing people asked for was timely crime prevention and sure penalties for criminals. Now the situation has changed: people demand safety above all else and, therefore, crime prevention in particular, maybe because the number of particularly abhorrent crimes, such as all crimes related to paedophilia and the sexual exploitation of women and children, is increasing at a worrying rate. Crime prevention must therefore be interpreted – and is being interpreted – as a certainty enabling people to exercise their freedoms, and the citizens are demanding precisely an undertaking that we will implement all possible measures to contain the spread of crime.
I believe that the importance of crime prevention has been stressed by Parliament on repeated occasions, and Parliament has produced a large number of instruments in this field. It was also appropriately and explicitly recognised by the Treaty of Amsterdam and then acknowledged on a number of other occasions up to and including the Tampere Council, which explicitly proposed to reinforce international cooperation on crime prevention by establishing a crime prevention network between national authorities. This proposal was then accepted by the French Presidency and the Swedish Presidency, which intend to establish this network of information and exchange of experiences and best practices to prevent crime through a proposal for a legislative initiative. The undertaking would include the exchange of information and news in as short a time as possible precisely in order to be able to study the origins of criminal phenomena. It would operate in a similar way to the way in which the Lisbon Drug Monitoring Centre operates, albeit in a different sector, which monitors changes in drug distribution from their origin. The objective is therefore to be able to study criminal phenomena right from their origins, monitoring the enormous capacity for evolution and veritable metamorphosis of crime to adapt to new forms of prevention, apart from anything else, and thus find new channels for expression.
To sum up, the network is a network for the exchange of information and best practices. It is certainly not an attempt to take away from Member States the power to make fundamental decisions on security policies, which are obviously the prerogative of the individual States and therefore the individual national parliaments and governments. In my opinion, we are simply showing the citizens that Europe is in the process of creating a genuine area of freedom and justice.
I would like to thank all the Members for their cooperation and Mrs Terrón, in particular, for the amendment she tabled, which has enhanced and complemented our work."@en1
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