Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-04-04-Speech-3-100"
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"Mr President, honourable Members of the European Parliament, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to thank you for inviting myself and my colleague Mrs Klingvall. It is a great honour to be able to talk to you today. The European Parliament is a very important player in European integration and the Swedish Presidency places great emphasis on having a good relationship with you. We hope we have been able to demonstrate this ambition in part, particularly in meeting committees in Stockholm.
Having said this I would like to focus on the question posed by Mr Posselt. I will attempt to respond to the parts concerning justice and home affairs, while my colleague Mrs Klingvall will reply to the questions concerning asylum and immigration.
Mr President, part of the question asked concerns the dialogue between the institutions and the measures which have been planned to make this dialogue more efficient and more clearly define the relationship between the institutions, the Member States and, for example, Europol and Eurojust.
The Treaty of Amsterdam and the Tampere Conclusions have meant major changes in the field of justice and home affairs. As I said earlier, ambitious plans have been laid down and the rate of work is increasing. Not only the scope but also the character of cooperation has changed. The institutions have partly taken on new roles and the way they work is being redesigned. We are in the middle of the implementation of Tampere, and we can identify certain areas in which all the institutions are adapting to new conditions.
It is my firm conviction that setting up an area of freedom, security and justice requires close cooperation between the Council, the Commission and Parliament, and it is in this spirit that the Swedish Presidency wishes to act.
The Treaty provides a clear framework for formal relations between the Council and the European Parliament when legal instruments and other instruments are being drawn up in the field of justice and home affairs. The Council is fully aware that the ambitious work in this area also means a considerable workload for you in Parliament. The Council’s deadlines for statements from the European Parliament must be determined by balancing considerations on the one hand of the importance of the issue being dealt with promptly and, on the other, of the workload of the European Parliament.
Here we have to jointly take responsibility for the future of the EU. It is important that we focus on what is important and really focus our time and energy on the central issues of EU development.
The Swedish Presidency has begun discussions on the way the Council works. At an informal Council meeting on 8 and 9 February, where we also had the pleasure of meeting Mr Watson, we all agreed that making the work of the Council more efficient is necessary if we are to achieve the targets which were laid down in Tampere.
One question which will be addressed in the overview which has begun is the constantly increasing multitude of initiatives in the area of justice and home affairs. It is my conviction that we must achieve better predictability and coordination when it comes to new legislation initiatives. Such an improvement would make the joint work of the institutions much easier.
I would also like to say something about the relationship between the institutions and Europol and Eurojust respectively. It is the conviction of the presidency that Parliament’s access to and opportunities to monitor, for instance, the work of Europol, can and should be improved. The presidency considers that this ought to be able to be arranged in practice. There may be measures which can be taken in the short term and which may not require any regulatory changes.
When it comes to Eurojust, the Council has not yet begun to discuss how Parliament and Commission are to be involved in the work and given the opportunity to monitor operations. It is nonetheless clear that questions concerning relations between Eurojust, the Commission and Parliament will be addressed in the negotiations. The proposed Council decisions on which Parliament is to issue its opinion are based on the regulations in the Europol Convention, both in terms of the Commission’s participation in the work and the opportunity of Parliament to monitor it. Where this issue, too, is concerned, I would like, however, to emphasise that we must consider the opportunity of further improving conditions for Parliament to gain access.
This is a very relevant area which we are discussing today. Studies clearly show that judicial cooperation is close to the heart of European citizens.
Before addressing the next question, I would like to emphasise our aim of maintaining good relations with you. To emphasise this we submitted a written report to you yesterday that clearly lays out the work of the Council in the field of justice and home affairs during the past year.
Mr Posselt also mentions the principle of mutual recognition and the measures which are planned to improve the mutual recognition of judgments in the field of criminal law.
The mutual recognition of judgments in criminal cases and traditional judicial cooperation have the same purpose: for cooperation between Member States to improve such that we can achieve an area of freedom, security and justice. In December last year, in the light of the conclusions from Tampere, the Council adopted a programme of measures to implement the principle of mutual recognition. This programme of measures is ambitious and wide-ranging. It contains a large number of measures which are to be implemented. The principle of mutual recognition as expressed in the programme of measures covers decisions before the judgment, the judgment itself and decisions after the judgment.
In light of this, Sweden, together with Belgium and France, has taken the initiative for an instrument on decisions before judgments. This concerns mutual recognition of decisions, and the freezing of assets and evidence. The instrument aims to quickly prevent assets and evidence being hidden from the authorities investigating the crime. When the instrument was presented, it was received positively, and negotiations will begin this spring during the Swedish Presidency.
During the spring it is likely that initiatives concerning mutual recognition and enforcement of fines will be submitted. This will see the beginning of work in recognising and implementing the judgments themselves.
I would also like to mention cooperation in the field of civil law, particularly the work which has commenced to create a European Enforcement Order for uncontested debts. A European Enforcement Order, unlike a national one, could be enforced in all Member States without any inter-state control. This is the first important step towards our goals, namely for judgments in one Member State to be able to be recognised and enforced directly throughout the entire Union.
To conclude I would like to answer Mr Posselt’s questions on the implementation of legislation in our field and the issue of what we just mentioned, an annual report on implementation.
In the work in creating an area of freedom, security and justice, we are largely dependent on legal instruments which must be implemented in the national law of Member States. A number of instruments which we agreed on at the end of the 1990s have already been able to enter into force. Furthermore, we currently have an opportunity to implement several instruments despite the fact that they have not entered into force in all Member States. After the entry into force of the Treaty of Amsterdam, several community legal instruments, such as regulations, have been adopted in the field of justice and home affairs. Several of these instruments have already entered into force or are on the way to doing so. One concrete example is what is known as the Brussels II Regulation on the recognition and enforcement of judgments in matrimonial matters.
We initially also mentioned that we are in the process of producing an overview of our working methods at JHA. The question of the Member States’ implementation of the measures taken in the field of JHA is one of the questions addressed in this context. I do not rule out further measures being needed if Member States are better to live up to what they have undertaken in the Council. Some form of control of implementation may be one way of putting pressure on all of us to really fulfil our undertakings.
The presidency today has no final solutions as to what such a mechanism would look like. The proposal referred to in the question, an annual report, may be one way but the Council will have to return to that question with more concrete information at a later date.
Today, organised crime largely transcends national borders, not least because of the development of new technology. There are justified demands and higher expectations from the European citizens that we really will deliver results, in both the field of justice and home affairs.
As you possibly know, on justice issues we currently have the heaviest legislation programme within the whole Union. In the Treaty of Amsterdam and the conclusions from the Tampere Summit the EU has put forward a very ambitious plan for how we are to succeed in achieving an area of freedom, security and justice. Implementation is, as you know, now at a very intense stage.
As you also know, the Treaty on European Union lays down that each year the European Parliament is to hold a debate on the progress which has been made in the areas covered by Title VI of the Treaty on European Union. Although the Treaty only refers to the third pillar, I and my colleagues do not wish to restrict the debate to questions concerning the third pillar. Often there is an intimate link between issues falling under the first and third pillars.
In general it can be said that the year 2000, which is what we are reporting on today, is year one of the post-Tampere period. As I said, Tampere meant a major step forward in justice and home affairs, and a very ambitious programme was adopted.
I would like to begin by briefly mentioning some of the progress made in the field of justice during 2000. In that year the Justice and Home Affairs Council passed around twenty legal instruments, eight of which were regulations and three conventions. Action plans have been adopted for almost all areas of activity on justice and home affairs. Over and above this the Council adopted over thirty conclusions, resolutions, recommendations and reports.
Progress was made on a number of issues by the very successful French and Portuguese presidencies. Decisions were reached in several important areas in terms of combating economic crime. A decision was passed on protection of the Euro, and at the joint meeting of JHA/Ecofin in Luxembourg on 17 October, a number of important decisions were adopted, e.g. concerning money laundering. We took the first step in the process towards setting up Eurojust, which we consider an incredibly important aspect in the fight against organised crime. We made major efforts in the fight against IT crime, e.g. by adopting a decision on combating child pornography on the Internet. Furthermore, we succeeded in developing the principle of mutual recognition by adopting a programme of measures regarding mutual recognition of judgments in criminal cases.
Several decisions were also passed to improve cooperation in the field of civil law, for example, on the service of documents, insolvency and on the recognition and enforcement of judgments in matrimonial matters."@en1
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