Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-04-04-Speech-3-282"
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"en.20010404.11.3-282"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, between the first and second readings, the Council has changed its position slightly, but not sufficiently. If the European Parliament remains firm over the basic issue, I think that the Council will ultimately change to the extent we require. The persistent breach of the professional secrecy of lawyers and those in similar professions is unacceptable. The authorities have no right to touch this type of secrecy. Furthermore, the Council, which is crippled by this obsession with entering the private area of professional secrecy, is continuing to move away from what must be the fundamental basis for revising the directive, which is to prioritise the fight against international organised crime. This issue is not being paid the attention it deserves. The professional secrecy of lawyers and those in similar professions is not a secondary issue. It is a basic question of culture and civilisation. It is quite unacceptable under any rule of law that is worthy of the name that lawyers should be forced by the law to become informers. It is surprising that the Council, at a time when so many fundamental rights abound, is vacillating on this issue and dares to attack one of European citizens’ basic guarantees.
The new proposal is not as bad as the previous one, but it is still not good enough. Professional secrecy is untouchable, not just in the context of trials in process but also in the context of legal consultation. There is no question of giving any privileges to lawyers, who can and must be prosecuted if they are directly involved in criminal activities or are suspected of being so. What cannot be allowed to happen is for lawyers to be prosecuted because of clients that hire them and much less become, in turn, the persecutors of clients who hire them. As a matter of fact, the proposal also contains other little traps, such as the open door to Member States to extend the type of information supplied by lawyers to other areas, which makes the Council’s text particularly dangerous and perverse. What the directive must do is to guarantee to protect professional secrecy, which is not a guarantee for lawyers but for society, for the rule of law and for Europe’s citizens. The directive must also distinguish between what is advocacy in the true sense of the word, including legal consultation and other types of activity in which the lawyer can act but in which, materially, the activity is not one of advocacy in the true sense of the word. In one, secrecy is inviolable, and in the other the lawyer can always be prosecuted for withholding information, like any other citizen."@en1
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