Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-11-12-Speech-1-093"
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"en.20011112.8.1-093"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, curiously, two European States that have never been members of the European Union, Norway and Iceland, were the first to establish, on a regional basis, an area for the free movement of persons. Towards the end of 1957, through the Nordic Passport Union, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Iceland, five European States, opened their borders to people while another six sketched out a common market, giving priority to the movement of goods in a Customs Union. The two groups of States chose to take quite different routes: the first establishing EFTA, and the second aiming for a Europe that would be united in more than just economic terms. Fortunately, the project embodied by the Six, which are today Fifteen and will soon be almost double that, although the more ambitious and complex of the two, has proved to be more than just a facilitator of free trade or of border crossing. It has proved to be attractive to many of the founders of the Nordic institutions and, for that very reason, our report attempts to make sense of the contradictions and the chance events of history, by integrating Norway and Iceland into the Schengen area and, most importantly, in the case of the Swedish initiative, into the European Union’s area of freedom, security and justice.
Thus, this Swedish initiative extends the Union’s area of free movement beyond the official geographical borders of Europe, with the corresponding consequences for the legal and judicial sphere, making Norway and Iceland countries in which the common rules on extradition contained in the Schengen acquis will apply. Who could have imagined, 45 years ago, that this would be possible?
Underpinning this historical development, or rather, this need, which implies new requirements and commitments, and thereby changes Europe and requires it to make progress, is the certainty that the Tampere programme, which involves moving from the intergovernmental method to the Community method, will lead to the communitisation of judicial cooperation, because this is what the governments of the Fifteen wanted, because the work of the Commission and of Commissioner Vitorino must not be betrayed by ongoing hesitancy on the grounds of sovereignty and, most importantly, because the situation today requires Europe to have a legal and criminal protection system that serves as the primary instrument for combating international and cross-border crime.
The real difference, which should make us proud to be Europeans, does not lie in our military arsenal but in the quality of the new European laws that we in this House are helping, or will help to construct. These laws will have the power to reconcile deterrence and respect for freedoms without attacking the philosophical and cultural differences that shape the criminal law of any Member State. The European arrest warrant, based on the principle of mutual recognition of national court sentences, is, in the form proposed by Commissioner Vitorino, an example we should follow when considering the other aspects of Tampere, particularly the harmonisation of criminal law.
For all of these reasons, I hope that this Swedish initiative, which we welcome as timely and necessary, rapidly becomes obsolete, having been superseded by effective Community law, specifically on the arrest warrant, eliminating the two Union conventions, which were, admittedly, well-intentioned, but of limited effect. The idea is that these will be replaced by the mutual recognition of court sentences and the simple transfer of persons guilty of committing crimes, a step, Commissioner, which will create a single European area for extradition."@en1
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