Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-11-12-Speech-1-088"
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"en.20011112.7.1-088"2
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"Mr President, the two government initiatives on Europol that we are examining today, the first on the definition of areas of action, the second on the rules on the transmission of personal data, provide the European Parliament with the opportunity to raise a genuine question, which is how to organise democratic control over Europol.
This is a very important question, since police and judicial cooperation and, in particular, the management of analysis files that are kept by Europol, are very closely related to civil liberties. Today, since Europol is an intergovernmental body, it is controlled by the national parliaments; first and foremost, by the governments at the Council of Ministers for Justice and Home Affairs or their representatives on Europol’s management board, and lastly by a supervisory body made up of leading, independent figures.
The relevant parliamentary committee is proposing to completely change this system, even though it has only been in operation since 1999, and would like to entrust control of Europol solely to Community procedures, in other words, to the European Parliament.
We do not think this proposal is suitable. We do not consider the European Parliament to be the appropriate institution to undertake the democratic monitoring of sovereign police operations in the Member States, which are carried out by the national services and have implications for the very territory of the Member States. It would be better to keep an open mind while Europol is just beginning to carry out its work and to give the national parliaments the chance to organise and refine their control. They are also aware of this need.
For example, in September, the French Parliament imposed a ban on its parliament debating the draft agreements between Europol and Eastern European countries. It then lifted this ban when it had sufficient guarantees as to the security of the transmission of personal data.
We believe that this is a very positive approach. It is evidence that there is effective control by the national parliaments. In order to exercise this control further, the French Senate has also set up an internal specialised working group responsible for investigating issues of police and judicial cooperation. This is the example we should be following, Mr President, and we should even, without doubt, go further by improving horizontal coordination of the control carried out by the national parliaments.
They should work together in setting up an interparliamentary assembly to monitor Europol and police and judicial cooperation.
Better still, the Intergovernmental Conference, which is due to meet in 2004 and which, in fact, must deal with the role of national parliaments within the European structure, should propose to develop this type of interparliamentary cooperation and turn this into a new pillar of the European Union."@en1
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