Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-09-19-Speech-3-069"
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"en.20010919.6.3-069"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the Commission is grateful for your contributions to this debate. I shall certainly convey to President Prodi and to my colleague Christopher Patten the questions for which they are directly responsible within the Commission. For my part, I should simply like to emphasise three points. The first is to say that I fully share the idea that the strategy on terrorism should not be caught between the various pillars of the European Union. There must be a global strategy that harnesses various instruments, such as conflict prevention policy, of course, the development of a political dialogue with the most problematic regions under the common foreign and security policy, of course, development aid policy, of course, but also, and let us be quite clear on this point, security policy and police and judicial cooperation policy. We cannot ignore the deep-rooted causes of terrorism, but we cannot allow the slightest ambiguity to remain and we therefore state that no cause justifies the use of terrorism and violence that sacrifices innocent lives. The best way of combating terrorism in the name of democratic values, therefore, consists of using the weapons of the law, cooperation between police forces and cooperation between the courts.
It is worth emphasising, however, that there are clearly some issues which we must look into, such as the funding of terrorism, the need to rigorously apply the United Nations Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism, the need to adopt effective mechanisms to combat money laundering and the tax havens that provide financial support for terrorist groups and the United Nations Convention on arms trafficking. In other words, we need to implement the Palermo Convention on organised crime. These are many ways of proving, within the framework of the United Nations, that the people who died on 11 September did not die in vain. In other words, that States have learned the lesson and that they are willing to give incontrovertible proof that they are improving cooperation in the fight against terrorism.
The second issue that I wish to address concerns aviation safety. I am pleased to say that the Council of Ministers for Transport has decided that a working group will present an initial report on 15 October, not only on the most immediate safety measures that are being taken in airports and in aircraft but also on the need to conclude an agreement, especially with our American partners, on rapidly defining measures to improve the safety of air transport. I also wish to say that these issues will be discussed by representatives of the European Union at the General Assembly of the International Civil Aviation Organisation, which opens on 25 September.
With regard to political decisions – for example, the two framework decisions that the Commission has just approved – it is quite clear that unanimity could prove to be a tricky obstacle to overcome in Council. The Commission has already, on several occasions, expressed its sympathy with the idea that methods of decision-making under the third pillar should be streamlined and simplified. However, over and above the issue of unanimity, the Commission’s political position on the fight against terrorism is clear: no State must block decisions. Nevertheless, no State can opt out of the fight against terrorism. The effectiveness of the framework decisions also depends on their being implemented uniformly in all the States of the Union without exception, because we do not want a single haven for terrorist or criminal activities to exist within the European Union. To this end, I hope that the appeals of this Parliament and of public opinion are sufficiently strong to enable us to reach the compromise formulas necessary to improve police and judicial cooperation, which are the legitimate methods for combating terrorism in a democracy."@en1
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