Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-11-13-Speech-2-260"
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"en.20011113.11.2-260"2
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".
As the honourable Member will be aware, the World Anti-Doping Agency decided, on 21 August 2001, to establish its future headquarters in Montreal. This is a perfectly worthy city, which also offers many advantages. It must be said that, amongst the candidate cities, there were also perfectly worthy European cities that also offered numerous advantages for hosting the headquarters of this agency. What happened was that the European countries did not show sufficient coordination and the fact that so many European cities were put forward certainly favoured the choice of Montreal. I wish to make it quite clear that the Belgian presidency cannot be held responsible for this failure. It did make considerable efforts to overcome the problems, unfortunately, however, without success. Europe put forward several candidates, whereas other countries put forward only one, and it was this approach that won the day over the plethora of European candidates. I must repeat the fact that this issue does not fall within the competence of the Community, but rather within that of the Member States.
We must now apply to the future the lessons we have learned from the Tallinn meeting. The first lesson should be that of the European Union’s cohesion. Furthermore, yesterday, the Fifteen’s Ministers for Sport met in Brussels for an informal Council, and cohesion was one of the main items discussed there. The ministers agreed to join forces and adopt the same approach to combat the scourge that is doping, firstly at world level, in other words, to step up their action within the World Anti-Doping Agency and, secondly, at European level, where there are good grounds for putting a concerted anti-doping programme into action. There are good grounds because Europe is the most advanced continent in the fight against doping, the greatest number of world-class sporting events takes place here and because Europe has the greatest number of competitions between clubs of different sporting disciplines. Furthermore, we have the greatest number of accredited laboratories and we must continue to bring our knowledge to bear in the fight against doping at world level. Yesterday, I informed the ministers that a Community plan is being drafted and they gave me the green light to put this into action. I shall now begin consultations on the aspects to be included in this action plan and in 2002, we shall have the opportunity to discuss it properly. I should also like to say that, in order to improve this European cohesion, which must apply not only to the fifteen governments, but must also exist between governments and sports federations, at the beginning of the Spanish presidency, a meeting will be held between the fifteen Ministers for Sports and the European sports federations to decide on the best approach to adopt in order to combat doping."@en1
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