Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-07-03-Speech-3-280"
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"en.20020703.8.3-280"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I am reporting today on behalf of the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market as the rapporteur on a highly technical directive, the Machinery Directive. The Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market has examined this issue at a total of nine meetings and hearings over the last year and a half. I myself am a lawyer, and these technical matters are sometimes very difficult for a lawyer to deal with, but they are issues which we must address nonetheless. This is why the amendments before us – and I hope that the Commission will not take this amiss – propose, among other things, that as things stand at present, the article on the Commission and commitology should simply be deleted from the Commission's proposal, for we still do not regard the arrangements regarding commitology as adequate and satisfactory.
In my country, the Government has opportunities to develop legal provisions further. However, the other side of the coin is the Commission's full accountability to Parliament. This relationship of accountability between the Commission and Parliament has yet to be established, which is why we find it difficult to leave the further development of legal provisions entirely to the Commission without any scrutiny or control, and have therefore proposed the deletion of this article. In the remaining provisions of this directive and the subject of our vote tomorrow, there is a great deal of dense technical content. In many cases, the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market has merely tried to improve the structure of the provisions, since we feel that they are far from perfect from a legal draftsman's point of view.
We are also aware that there is intensive debate in the Council on the structuring of the definitions. The discussions on the individual definitions have been outstanding. We have now reached agreement in the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market. I have the impression that the Committee's proposals will be widely endorsed tomorrow. I have had comprehensive discussions with the shadow rapporteur Bill Miller, who will rise in a moment and to whom I would also like to express my thanks, and I think that the Parliament's position on the first reading is generally clear.
I would like to draw your attention to a further issue which is addressed in the articles but which is set forth in more precise terms in the recitals. I have already mentioned that I am a lawyer, but when I was working through this directive, I sometimes had a minor crisis, for it is sometimes utterly incomprehensible even for a lawyer and extremely hard to wade through. We must ensure that the regulations are much clearer so that our clients – namely the European consumers and the subjects of European law – can actually understand them. This is why this report finally proposes the drafting of a horizontal directive, an overarching EC directive laying out uniform provisions governing all aspects relevant and important to CE markings in general, such as the form of the marking, implications of affixing the marking, market surveillance and so on. Below this level, there would be a general product safety directive, so that together, there would be two overarching directives. Then there would be the individual segment directives on low voltage, machinery, medical devices, and, if appropriate, on high voltage and so on. The segment directives should simply state that we need this or that declaration of conformity, or that we need a type-examination, or that we just need specific checks to be carried out by the manufacturer. In other words, what is required are clearer directives which the consumer can understand better, and also a more clearly structured format for the individual elements within the directive itself."@en1
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