Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-04-08-Speech-1-091"
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"en.20020408.7.1-091"2
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"Mr President, the Commission is today proposing a directive which requires the Member States to provide for criminal sanctions to punish a number of particularly serious breaches of Community environmental law.
No one is denying that we must improve our protection of an environment which is suffering increasing degradation and that we must use severe preventive measures. The problem, in our view, however, is the Commission’s intention to use the Community instrument – namely, the directive – based, in this case, on Article 175(1) of the Treaty establishing the European Community – to do this. This Article provides for several joint actions to protect the environment, but it fully respects, in accordance with the general spirit of the Treaties, the autonomy of the Member States in the area of criminal law. The claim that the right to provide for criminal penalties is implicit in the Community responsibility for environmental protection on the grounds that it is an essential part of
its implementation and cannot therefore be separated from it is utterly unfounded. If criminal penalties are implicitly provided for in Article 175(1), why are they not also implicitly provided for in all the other articles of the Treaty which allow Community law to be drafted in a number of areas? We will eventually reach a situation where we are disregarding a fundamental principle of the Treaty, namely national competence in the area of criminal law. And if we disregard this principle, we will edge slightly further towards the concept of a centralised Union which is not what we want.
This does not mean that we must take no action at all – quite the opposite, in fact! The Danish Presidency presented a draft framework decision on the protection of the environment through criminal law, which proposed enforcing stricter penalties whilst also respecting the freedom of the Member States to establish their legal basis on the third pillar, which is on the purely intergovernmental part of the Treaty. This option is much more suitable and this is the option, Mr President, that we should choose."@en1
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