Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-10-02-Speech-2-059"
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"en.20011002.3.2-059"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, taking as a starting point the reports by my esteemed fellow Members Mr Evans and Mr Pirker, I would like to talk about the communication from Commissioner Vitorino which is at the heart of this. He is a colleague whom we hold in extraordinarily high regard on the basis of our joint work in the Committee on Citizens' Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs, and whose opinion I have very little in common with!
A fundamental debate is taking place about asylum and immigration in Europe. It is about guidelines for asylum and immigration in Europe. We need to be clear about two things: first about the quotas to be applied and secondly about the content. As far as the methodology is concerned, European directives on asylum and immigration can only set minimum standards. It is only possible to oblige the European Union as a whole to accept minimum standards. Anything going beyond that will not be accepted.
One example of this is that Commissioner Vitorino's proposals on family reunification may suit some people, but it is not possible to stipulate a binding solution for the entire Union. Some revision is needed here.
As regards content, we need to limit and control immigration. Mr President-in-Office of the Council, you mentioned the concept of ‘fortress Europe’. It is precisely because we do not want to erect a fortress Europe and could not do so anyway that we must control and limit immigration. The approach proposed by Commissioner Vitorino does not meet these requirements.
A couple more examples: by adopting the concept of the safe third country, we in Germany have been able to reduce the number of asylum-seekers from some 450 000 to well under 100 000. Commissioner Vitorino has virtually given up this concept, by making its use dependent on conditions which make it almost impossible to apply in practice.
My second point is that binding material grounds for granting asylum are laid down in the Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. It would be giving asylum-seekers an incentive if we go beyond the binding framework of the Geneva Convention, as in the case of persecution by non-State agents for example. There are some very worthy individual arguments in favour of this, but we cannot allow a higher level of asylum than at present. The problem of asylum is with the procedure. It is still a fact that 90% of all asylum-seekers in Europe are not victims of political persecution. So we need to get the procedure under control. If we can manage to bring the procedure to a rapid conclusion, we can be more generous when it comes to grounds for the granting of asylum. However, this does not sit well with the three-stage asylum procedure that Commissioner Vitorino is proposing, for example.
Commissioner Vitorino, if Mr Schily, the German Minister for the Interior, who as you know does not belong to the same party as I do, behaves in the same way in Council as he does in Germany then your proposals have no hope at all!"@en1
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