Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-04-11-Speech-4-020"
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"en.20020411.1.4-020"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I should like first of all to thank Parliament and its rapporteur, Mr Beazley, for having succeeded in reaching agreement on all the points under discussion. I must tell you that the Commission supports Parliament, just as Parliament supports the Commission.
Secondly, with regard to the system of classification, a new study on classification was started by my staff in January and should be completed by the second half of 2002. It will be forwarded to Parliament and we will discuss it and draw the relevant conclusions from it.
Thirdly, media education: as I have said on many occasions, this is one of my competences, one of my objectives. Our children learn, to a greater or lesser degree, to read, write and to do arithmetic, but they never to learn to read and to gauge this society of images that surrounds them. This is why we have launched the first pilot projects for image education. This is also why the forthcoming ‘Net-Days’ in November 2002, which will link up hundreds of thousands of school classes in most of the Member States and, furthermore, in other parts of the world, will this year be dedicated to image education and image analysis. Our approach, therefore, is extremely practical.
To conclude, I wish to draw your attention to the fact that a single Commissioner, the European Parliament or the Commission alone cannot deal with all of these issues. This is why the proposals will be studied in conjunction with all the Commissioners responsible for the areas affected by this issue, and with institutions other than the Commission that have responsibility in this area, such as Europol, for example. What is needed is concerted action, which we shall continue to implement.
We have a shared aim, which is to protect our children. There are different ways of achieving this, as the honourable Members have rightly stated, and in order to accomplish this objective we must, therefore, join forces. I have listened with great interest to the specific and shocking examples provided by the speakers. There are thousands of such examples, which merely confirm our feeling that we must translate our words into action and that we will not be able to resolve the problems in the European institutions alone, but that concerted action by all key players is necessary, including the NGOs working to protect minors and human dignity, at both European as well as national or regional level.
As the report states, progress has already been made in a very short time. For example, associations of Internet Service Providers have been established in most Member States and the ISPs in most Member States are members of the European Internet Service Providers’ Association (EuroISPA), which has promoted the adoption of codes of conduct for the responsibility of providers. Hotlines have been set up in the vast majority of Member States to deal with complaints about illegal or offensive content.
The European Commission is supporting the creation of these hotlines with its action plan for safer Internet use. According to the information provided by the Member States, it seems that the majority of Internet sites advocating political extremism or which depict sexual violence, and very many paedophile or pornographic sites are located outside the European Union, hence the importance of a strategy in this field that is not only European, but global.
At the same time, the industry is also working on establishing classification and filtering systems, on the creation of protected areas or ‘walled gardens’; portals in which ISPs guarantee the quality of the sites to which they provide access. The Community action plan for safer Internet use is also encouraging these initiatives. There have certainly been some very positive experiences, but there have also been sites which are, unfortunately, appalling, and which cannot be effectively closed down.
With regard to the application of the recommendation by radio stations and television companies, all the Member States now have devices available which ensure that programmes likely to harm minors are preceded by a warning sound or have a symbol on the screen throughout the programme. We know full well that the times that are supposedly ‘closed’ to children no longer have any meaning today, because our children are perfectly capable of recording programmes that are broadcast whilst they are fast asleep. Furthermore, filter systems can only be used with digital television. It will, therefore, be easier to filter programmes when digital television is up and running, but for the moment, this is happening very slowly.
In 1999, the Commission had a study produced on parental control of television programmes, which recommended giving the greatest emphasis to self-regulation whilst making filter devices available to families at an affordable price. I agree, on this point, with all Members of the House who approve of self-regulation, on condition that this is backed by legislation. This is the direction we must concentrate on in future.
Mr President, I should like to close by answering some specific questions raised by honourable Members.
First of all, I shall address my comments to the rapporteur, Mr Beazely: it would be premature to present a new report by the end of 2002, but under the review, we shall take all of Parliament’s observations into account. We shall continue our work, but the report will probably not be ready by the end of 2002."@en1
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