Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-10-22-Speech-1-070"
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"en.20011022.5.1-070"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, today sees the fulfilment of a small dream. I have ten minutes' speaking time, as much as only a Group chairman can normally expect. This, however, comes about through the grouping together of two reports, which do not actually belong together. So I would prefer to speak on them separately.
The Schengen Information System was established in 1995 on the basis of the Convention of 1990 which implemented the Schengen Agreement. Today, as a police investigation system overlapping states and supported by computers, it facilitates online access to over 8 million items of data produced by investigations and is thus the most comprehensive database in Europe. It is used by Iceland and Norway as well as thirteen EU Member States. All this makes SIS a successful component of a new European internal security policy, made necessary by the dismantling of internal borders and the resulting loss of surveillance.
Two problems concern us today, the first being advances in technology. The Schengen Information System as we know it today was originally conceived for eighteen Member States. The fact that all the present acceding countries will join in SIS on their accession makes it urgently necessary to give thought today to what will be its successor. Technology has moved on in the meantime as well. The initiative taken by the kingdoms of Sweden and Belgium to develop SIS II are therefore much to be welcomed.
As the development of SIS II will require over three years' preparatory work, these initiatives lay the necessary legal foundations for its budget. The originators have, however, overshot their mark a bit. In order to ensure the maximum influence on technical development, the Member States are to take part in the comitological process through a combination of administrative and regulatory committees. This will therefore involve a maximum of additional bureaucratic effort.
It is not clear to me why, at a development stage where only technical aspects are to be discussed, the Member States are to join in discussing and deciding on every detail. The suggestion that a regulatory committee should be in place to deal with all matters concerning the system's architecture and with data protection issues, also goes against Council decision 468/99. This stated that recourse should be had to the regulatory procedure only for measures of general scope intended to apply essential provisions of basic legal instruments. Such is quite evidently not the case here.
At this stage, I would like to point out to the representatives of the Council that, for example, when Eurodac was set up, there was deliberately no official participatory procedure, and the Member States exerted their influence only through an informal network of technical experts. This saved us all a great deal of time and money and still produced an effective result. At the same time, I have confidence in the technical know-how in this field possessed by the Commission, which is entrusted with guiding this development.
I therefore suggest to Member States that they replace the superfluous bureaucratic combination of administrative and regulatory procedure by a combination of administrative and consultative procedure. Less is sometimes more.
The second problem is the development of law. The Member States did admittedly decide as early as the Amsterdam Inter-Governmental Conference to integrate the Schengen Agreement into the European legal area, but lack of agreement meant that the Schengen Information System was assigned to the third pillar. There is no doubt, however, that collection of data on persons who have been barred from entering a Member State is within the scope of the first pillar. This is another reason why we have two initiatives today, one by the Belgian Presidency and another by Sweden.
As Europe's Parliament, we strive to integrate Schengen and the Schengen Information System into the first pillar, and as a whole if at all possible. It is only in that way that appropriate parliamentary control can be guaranteed. So I will go on the record as welcoming, as a step in this direction, the financing of Schengen II out of Community funds with effect from 2002. The initiative unfortunately forgets to submit to Parliament the Commission's half-yearly interim reports on the stage the development has reached. It is scarcely comprehensible that the budget procedure of the European Community should be applied to finance Schengen II without the body legislating for that budget – namely Parliament – being informed about these developments at the time. However much the direction taken by the report's contents may be worthy of approval, in this respect there must be clear improvement. Apart from that, I can only give my full and wholehearted support to the proposals as a whole. I crave your indulgence for having to leave in about a quarter of an hour – as indeed must other ladies and gentlemen – but we have a meeting of the Committee on Citizen’s Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs. We have some votes to take part in there as well. So there is no disrespect for this House.
Let me begin with the area of civil law. When the Maastricht Treaty came into force in 1993, judicial cooperation in civil matters became a matter of common concern for the Member States. Then the Treaty of Amsterdam, by means of Article 65 of the Treaty Establishing the European Community, transferred this cooperation from the third pillar to the first. Its entry into force brought about active European lawmaking. Regulations on conflicts of law or of jurisdiction were adjusted, the Council directive on insolvency procedures and on the service of legal documents in civil and commercial cases was adopted, and draft directives on the gathering of evidence and on rights of access in matrimonial cases were submitted to the Council.
The entry into force of the present Treaty of Nice means that future decisions on judicial cooperation in civil matters will finally be reached by codecision procedure with qualified majority in the Council. You can see that things in this field are developing at breakneck speed. Member States will continue to have sole responsibility for the framework and content of professional training in civil law, but it will be the Community's responsibility to support them whether in the removal of obstacles to the application of Community law or in the cooperation of the judicial authorities.
In no area of European law is continuing professional education so imperative as in civil law, in which harmonisation has already made progress. Criminal and administrative law, on the other hand, are still only at the beginning of their European development. This continuing education was formerly supported by two EU programmes. GROTIUS, the joint incentive and exchange programme for the legal profession, came to an end in 2000. This promotion was maintained only by a successor programme, GROTIUS Programme Civil, which was limited to one year. The same year saw the expiry of the Robert Schuman Project, which had been limited to three years and served to make lawyers more aware of Community law.
The Commission proposal before us today now represents the legal basis for further financial support for activities in the field of legal cooperation in civil matters. It promotes judicial cooperation and improved mutual understanding of legal systems, as well as measures to transpose and implement Community legislation in this area and better information for the public. For the first time, alongside finance for specific projects, there is the prospect of financial help with the running costs of European NGOs. I can only emphatically support that.
The facilitation of involvement by the acceding countries is also especially to be welcomed. Apart from the essential rejoicing at the direction of this draft, which is made all the greater by the generous financial framework amounting to EUR 14.5 million up to 2006, there remain a few critical points. The stipulation that NGOs can only apply for support if two-thirds of the Member States participate in them can hardly be complied with even today. The prospect of enlargement therefore makes it a matter of urgency to reduce this hurdle to one-third, or else this directive's good beginnings will be nipped in the bud.
I also wonder why the Commission, contrary to its former practice – for example in the context of the GROTIUS programmes – has omitted to define precisely who is entitled to apply, members of the legal profession in this case. The debate on the money-laundering directive showed us how vital it is in this area to define terms. Member States must not have discretion to define terms when support with European funds is at issue. I have therefore proposed the adoption of the old definition from the GROTIUS civil law programme.
I would also like to say, on this point, that I would have been glad if the EU had continued to bear up to 80% of project costs, rather than reducing this share to 50%. This was, however, not what the relevant committee wanted. I think, though, that the EU continues to bear a great responsibility for the further development of judicial cooperation. This responsibility is likely to increase rather than decrease in the future. Here, too, we must continue to be a motive force.
So much for the first part concerning the area of civil law; I now come to the debate on the Schengen Information System."@en1
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