Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-10-02-Speech-2-041"
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"en.20011002.3.2-041"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Minister, today’s debate has come at a crucial time: we are two weeks away from the European Conference on Migration, which has been organised by the Belgian Presidency, and two months from the Laeken European Council, which is tasked with carrying out the mid-term review of the Tampere agenda.
I should also insist on the fact that a genuine European policy on immigration and asylum will not exist – over and above the legislative framework – unless national policies also converge in practice and in pursuit of common objectives.
This, then, is the aim of the Commission's proposed open coordination policy, which is similar to the method already used – incidentally with success – for employment, for example. An open coordination method of this kind seems to me to have the advantages of flexibility and transparency as well as respecting subsidiarity, while providing a powerful incentive to harmonise legislation and national practice – even spontaneously I would say – and being a good indicator of the areas in which Community intervention is really essential.
It requires the Member States to agree in the Council on common guidelines proposed to them by the Commission after a broad process of consultation. They will then have to implement them at national level using the national legislative and administrative means at their disposal. The Member States will be invited to draw up national reports every year in which they will have to take stock of the progress which they have made in implementing these common guidelines. The Commission's summary of these reports should make it possible to identify, on a case-by-case basis, the weak points in the essential convergence exercise and, if necessary, to refine and add to the common guidelines.
In July, we put forward a first set of guidelines concerning the management of migratory flows, the admission of economic migrants, partnership with third countries and the integration of third-country nationals into our societies. Further proposals will be made for asylum when we publish the first report on the follow-up to our communication of November 2000, which will be sent to you in the coming months. The Commission hopes that the Council and the European Council will give these new guidelines their blessing so that implementation can start immediately and a first complete round be conducted in the course of next year.
In conclusion, I should like to come back to some fundamental principles which in the current circumstances it is, more than ever, important to reiterate.
First of all, asylum is a right which is guaranteed and regulated by international instruments and confirmed by the European Charter of Fundamental Rights. No one will dispute the fact that it may be abused. And it is up to us, as politicians, to put a stop to this, not by further weakening the position of those who really need international protection, but – and this is a better bet – by aligning the procedures and criteria applied at national level and making them more effective. The introduction, in the medium term, of a one-stop shop, which you support in your resolution, would, therefore, unquestionably be a significant step forward in my opinion. In the meantime, it would seem to be essential to endeavour to improve the quality of initial decisions, as recommended in our proposal on asylum procedures.
Secondly, we cannot deny that immigration occurs. It would be eminently regrettable if some people were to take advantage of current feeling to revert to a policy of slogans. Slogans will not resolve the immigration problem. Above all, name-calling, which is an accessory of racist and xenophobic sentiment, must be avoided. What we do have is a genuine policy to manage migratory flows at both national and European level. And the terms of reference would appear to me to be obvious. Legal immigration channels need to be clearly identified and the possibilities which they represent need to be quantified, not on the basis of the unexpected whims and uncertainties of the economic cycle, but on the basis of a realistic assessment of our societies’ structural needs and how many immigrants they would be able to accommodate. A dialogue with the countries of departure is necessary and it is important to take into account the different types of immigration with which we are faced. Some immigrants are long-term and are expected to stay in their host societies for good, but others – and there are increasing numbers of them – are part of cyclical migration flows, which implies – and this should be encouraged – that they will maintain a stronger link with their region of origin. Finally, the credibility of a proactive immigration policy must be consolidated by an effective campaign to combat illegal immigration and the trafficking in human beings which is associated with it. We should give serious thought to creating a major new Community instrument, alongside those which are designed to combat exclusion, which might, for example, address the specific problem of integrating immigrants.
Today, cultural pluralism is becoming a characteristic of our societies, particularly in urban areas, which raises very serious challenges. It may inject real dynamism into society if it is based on genuine mutual tolerance. But it may also be the source of confrontation and social division. This mutual tolerance and respect will be one of the keys to social balance and cultural progress in our European societies.
I should like to thank the European Parliament for helping to enrich this debate, which I sincerely hope will be brought to a positive conclusion. Through the impetus given by the Belgian Presidency and with the personal commitment of the Minister, Mr Duquesne – whom I should like to thank and whose efforts to reach compromises in a true European spirit I can vouch for – I hope that Laeken will constitute a major step towards establishing the area of freedom, security and justice. This is not a dream; it is a reality which the public is increasingly keen to experience.
Both of these should be essential stages in the process of drawing up common immigration and asylum policies. In adopting the two resolutions which are on the table today, whose quality and balance should be saluted – and I should like to take this opportunity to congratulate the rapporteurs, Mr Pirker and Mr Evans – the European Parliament will, I am sure, express clear and forceful priorities in good time.
Since the tragic events of 11 September, the European Union has been confronted with a new political agenda in the fields of justice and home affairs. Thanks in particular to the determination of the Belgian Presidency, it has so far been facing up to this remarkably well.
The European Council of 21 September sent out a very clear message to us. We should adopt as a matter of urgency the measures necessary to reinforce the internal security of our Member States and their nationals while making the fight against terrorism a priority. At the same time, however, the European Council of 21 September emphasised that neither should we stop working on other issues set out in the Treaty of Amsterdam and thus towards our objective of safeguarding and developing an area of freedom, security and justice. I am delighted that the European Council underlined the need to strike a political balance between stepping up police and judicial cooperation with a view to combating crime and terrorism, on the one hand, and establishing an area of freedom, security and justice, that is protecting the fundamental rights of the public, on the other.
I have always stressed in these debates here with the European Parliament, but also with the Council, that we need common immigration and asylum policies more than ever. The relevance of both the provisions of the Treaty of Amsterdam and the Tampere conclusions has been repeatedly reaffirmed. I am convinced that the public genuinely expects, and even demands, the addition of European value to national policies whose limitations are becoming ever more apparent, whether they be security policies or policies to protect civil liberties. To achieve an objective of this kind and identify the European added value which we can bring to national policies, I believe that we should take into account both the security imperatives and the respect for values which are the common defining values of our European Union, including the freedom of movement which is guaranteed by the Schengen Agreement.
The Council has asked the Commission to evaluate its proposals on asylum and immigration in the light of the terrorist attacks in the United States of America. We have already buckled down to this task. The political will to move forward on these matters which was reaffirmed by both the European Council and the Justice and Home Affairs Council should give us new hope. As the Minister emphasised just now, it is true that the slow progress and the difficulties which we have encountered on certain dossiers could cast serious doubt on our ability to take substantial decisions within the very strict deadlines in the Commission timetable. This new momentum should benefit all aspects of our cooperation on justice and home affairs, provided that the Member States recognise that it is impossible to have European legislation which is a faithful copy of fifteen national laws and that they will each have to give some ground in the search for a common solution from which they will all benefit.
As far as the substance of today’s debate is concerned, I note that there is broad convergence between the Commission’s views and those of Parliament, as reflected in the two excellent reports by Mr Pirker and Mr Evans. Whether they concern the principles on which the common European asylum regime should be based or the components of a coherent approach towards the migration phenomenon, we do not have any difficulty in going along with most of your recommendations. In some cases we have even anticipated them and several of your requests are already taken into account in our proposals on the legal status of long-term residents and on admission for employment purposes, or again in our communication of last July which followed on from the one of November 2000 and went into more detail on some of the guidelines.
In other cases, we are preparing to follow them up, for example in the communications which I intend to propose to the Commission for adoption in the coming months, the first of which concerns the fight against illegal immigration and the second repatriation policies and external border checks. I also share your concern about the need to develop practical proposals to build a real partnership between the Union and the countries of origin and transit. We have started work on this by setting up a high-level group, whose mandate will be extended thanks to the implementation of a new budgetary instrument with the strong backing of the European Parliament.
Nevertheless, people may feel that this work and the implementation of the action plans adopted by the Council are not bearing sufficient fruit. I therefore agree that in general we should recognise the significance of these migratory phenomena by giving them greater consideration when we are formulating the European Union’s external policy. To a certain extent we have to recognise that we are hostages of the division between the second and third pillars, which is completely unjustified because on closer inspection the very close links between the European Union’s development and migration policies become apparent."@en1
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