Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-05-15-Speech-2-166"
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"en.20010515.7.2-166"2
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".
Mr President, we are debating the revision of Directive 92/59/EEC on general product safety and there is a priority which the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament share, which is to improve consumer health and safety. This has always been a desire, but in the current circumstances it has become a firmer commitment.
The proposal is intended to guarantee the safety of marketed products and promote compliance with the obligations of producers and distributors. Producers must only market safe products, must provide consumers with reliable information, prevent risks and, where necessary, finally withdraw dangerous products already on the market. Nor must distributors supply any product which they know to be unsafe, and they must cooperate with the markets’ monitoring network, which also involves the authorities charged with monitoring product safety.
This revision has followed a method which we believe to be adequate, including the consultation which took place before making the proposal with non-governmental organisations and social agents, companies and so on. More than fifteen of these organisations were consulted before making the proposal and the intention was to correct the gaps and insufficiencies in the implementation of the directive over previous years. Some of these suggestions are included above all in the first Council proposal presented by the Commission.
We agreed with the majority of the proposal made to us. However, we presented thirty amendments, which we believed improved the proposal. At first reading, twenty-one of them were adopted, totally or partially. They better defined the concepts of ‘safe product’ and ‘recuperation’, pointed to the need for periodic reports to the European Parliament on the success or failure of the implementation of the directive, as well as labelling in the language of the country where the products were marketed, and proposed, amongst other things, that the candidate countries be included in the RAPEX system.
Nevertheless, certain issues continued to concern the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy, the alternative rapporteurs and the Commission itself. And in this second reading we are presenting just eleven amendments which were discussed in the Environment Committee and approved at the last sitting by a significant majority, and which at the various informal meetings – there were many and I must thank the Commission and the Council for their interest in this report – we tried to reduce.
I believe we can easily reach an agreement on five of these amendments. They are amendments which refer to the possibility of an external certification of safe products, to the possibility of harmonising the monitoring programmes of the different Member States, to the inclusion of the precautionary principle in such an important issue and to the establishment and promotion of a network of competent authorities in relation to product safety.
There are more difficulties with other amendments, such as those which refer to the exporting of unsafe products to the Third World and to the safety of services. We believe it is very important that there should be specific legislation. At the moment – I do not know if this is the case in the rest of Europe, but in my country it is – services such as tourism, courses in academies or telecommunications are the subjects of much debate, because in many of them there is flagrant abuse going on. We therefore wish to ensure that there is legislation on this issue soon, as well as legislation relating to the nature of committees.
Mr President, I believe that it will not be difficult to reach an agreement on the eleven amendments approved by the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy. And I will stress one which I believe should be a distinguishing mark for Europe. I am talking about our attitude to the ethics of exporting products, which Europeans consider to be unsafe, to other countries. This seems to us to be an essential amendment because, if they are unsafe for Europeans, they are unsafe for the whole world, even if other countries have more flexible regulations.
We therefore believe that by supporting the proposal of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy, we are also supporting principles which are of paramount importance to the European Union."@en1
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