Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-09-05-Speech-3-257"
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"en.20010905.7.3-257"2
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".
Mr President, it is a pity that, after a whole day during which Parliament has debated matters in which it has no legislative competence, only in the afternoon and then the evening will we actually be talking about areas in which we do have legislative power. It is rather a bad Parliamentary habit, and we should try to resist these headline-grabbing temptations.
Having said that, the European Commission’s proposal for a directive is an important document and will help to protect rights and also freedoms on line, not only as regards the electronic communications of citizens within Europe, and thus we congratulate the Commission on the work that has been done. I must start, however, by saying that the Commission itself should, I believe, take greater account of the fact that the difficulties and delays in implementing directives in the Member States mean that we are in danger of having European laws that are increasingly specific and detailed, which attempt to keep up with technological progress, but then we find ourselves updating a 1997 directive, now four years old, when this directive has still not been implemented by all the Member States: it is a specific directive relating to a general directive from 1995 which itself has not yet been adopted by the Member States. It is therefore this legislative method that should probably be debated!
Having said that, however, I genuinely believe that important measures for protecting European citizens’ privacy are guaranteed and specified, measures that the Committee on Citizens’ Freedoms and Rights and its rapporteur fully upheld in committee and which were adopted.
I would now like to focus on two points that are, perhaps, more politically controversial: the power of public and state authorities to have access to European Union citizens’ personal data, and unsolicited commercial e-mail.
On the first point, the Committee on Citizens’ Freedoms and Rights accepted the European Commission’s desire not to grant the kind of carte blanche or blank cheque that some countries in the Union would have liked, to be able to intercept and access European Union citizens’ personal data, for instance by accessing data collected by telephone companies.
The Commission is right to insist on and uphold this point. We hope that it will also follow us in a further request expressed by the Committee on Citizens’ Freedoms and Rights, of placing a precise obligation on all derogations from the directive or European regulations that are not completely exceptional, based on a specific law accessible to the public, and limited in time; this will have the consequence, which we have written into the report, of prohibiting generalised surveillance. I think it is important that the Commission should uphold this, because I believe the greatest threat to citizens’ privacy is the omnipotence of the state in accessing personal data.
On the other point – unsolicited commercial e-mails – I have preferred, and the Committee on Citizens’ Freedoms and Rights has followed me, not to accept the Commission proposal of imposing a harmonised Europe-wide opt-in system, but to leave each Member State the choice of opting in or opting out. I believe, in fact, that both systems are ineffective at stopping so-called spamming: true spammers who block up electronic mail boxes are people who do so fraudulently, hiding their addresses, and so have no interest in respecting either opting-in or opting-out. In the absolute ban of opt-in, I see a threat to the freedom of expression of those who conduct e-commerce correctly: for freedom of expression it is not so easy to separate commercial messages from non-commercial messages, and there may be journalistic or political texts that are sponsored and as such could be treated as commercial messages.
I also believe that today there are instruments for self-regulation, filters and technologies that can solve the problem much more flexibly and effectively than the courts can. Furthermore, the costs that the consumer has to bear are set to fall with the liberalisation of telecommunications that the Commission is pressing for in the other directives in the package. Therefore, with flat rates and broad band connections, even the cost problem of connecting for a few seconds is becoming less important. That is why, faced with the possible risks of the opt-in system, we are opposed to a single, harmonised European system."@en1
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