Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-07-03-Speech-3-194"
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"en.20020703.6.3-194"2
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"Mr President, imagine, colleagues, that you are an intelligent and sensible person, you are on holiday in another EU country with your elderly and frail mother, you both end up being trapped for over half a day in an airless room by total strangers, offered little or no refreshment and, because there is a large gentleman blocking the door you feel your exit is cut off, so you end up signing a contract and paying a deposit for a timeshare product that you do not want. You return home to find that you have waved goodbye to the deposit of several thousand pounds and the company you dealt with is a worthless shell, constituted in some offshore haven. You have no chance of redress. Yes, this is a true story. How many of us have heard hapless tales like this from our constituents, despite the existence of a timeshare directive?
This report is timely. Its contents need to be acted on now, not delayed for further studies and reports.
But let me sound a note of caution. Whilst it will have the support of the Liberal Group, I am not totally convinced that this raft of rather complex and different legislative and non-legislative initiatives will answer the problem. The simple problem, to my mind, is this: these timeshare scams are one of the most appalling signals that we do not have, that we have not created a single European area of justice. Cross-border access to justice within the internal market is still fraught with many barriers for our citizens. Few, if any, of these scams are perpetrated against citizens in their own Member States. These rogues are only too easily able to profit from the lack of a single European civil area of justice. If they knew they would be pursued in their own countries they would think twice.
I commend paragraph 15 of the report as a good starting point for bringing these contracts within the definition of consumer contracts. It is this sort of horizontal approach that will eventually provide the answer. If we have proper cross-border access to justice then the timeshare scam bandits will think twice before they prey on our holidaying constituents."@en1
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