Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-09-23-Speech-1-057"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20020923.5.1-057"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:translated text |
".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the Seville European Council marked a major commitment in the field of asylum. It set the end of 2003 as the deadline for the adoption of all the legislative instruments of the first generation of acts concerning European asylum policy. In my view, this commitment by the Heads of State or Government is important for gauging the credibility of European policy in a field as sensitive as asylum policy.
I shall not hide the fact from Parliament – and never have done – that negotiations are currently giving some cause for concern. To be precise, I do not believe that the solution lies in a form of harmonisation that is tied to the lowest common denominator. This is clearly not where the added value of a European asylum policy lies. In parallel with
these negotiations, however, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Mr Ruud Lubbers, attended the informal Justice and Home Affairs Council in Copenhagen last week, and alerted us to the important decisions that will be taken at the next meeting of the executive committee of the High Commission: the approval of an agenda for international protection that will contribute, I am certain, to the debate on the major issues of asylum policy at world level and, consequently, also at European level.
With regard to today’s report, I thank and congratulate the rapporteur for the content of his report. The Commission is certainly proposing to introduce the open method of coordination into the field of asylum and immigration policies. I wish once again to make it clear, however, that we do not consider there to be any incompatibility between the open method of coordination and the adoption of legislative measures on asylum at European level. In fact, adopting legislation is an important part of creating a common asylum policy; the management of asylum policy can benefit from the open method of coordination, from convergence and from the harmonisation of the practices, measures and guidelines implemented by national administrations in the field of asylum.
I shall not hide the fact that not all the Member States are in agreement on applying the open method of coordination to the asylum policy. The fact is, however, that the Council itself recently followed the guidelines proposed by the Commission to request the creation of a network of actors in the field of asylum with a view to exchanging information and to studying current practices. The Commission, for its part, intends to use these instruments to identify new fields of action in relation to asylum – not only a comparison of policies, but also the idea of sharing best practice. There is, therefore, no contradiction between the open method of coordination and communitarisation, as generated by the Treaty of Amsterdam, and we even think that in the European Convention on the Future of Europe and in the context of the future Intergovernmental Conference, this compatibility between these two types of instruments must be demonstrated and emphasised.
With regard to the second dimension of the report: we will deal with the issue of the balance between internal security and the obligations of protection. The Commission maintains, in the document that we forwarded to Parliament on the relationship between safeguarding internal security and complying with the obligations and instruments of international protection, that it is possible to achieve an equitable balance between improving internal security in Europe, especially following the events of 11 September 2001, and ensuring that the rights of refugees and other values that are crucial to Europe’s democracies are protected.
The Commission welcomes the fact that the report we are debating here today shares this basic approach and recommends that genuine refugees and asylum seekers must not be victims of the events of the last year, but also that no opportunity must be given to those who support or commit terrorists acts to gain access to the territory of the Member States of the European Union. For this reason, the Commission fully supports the guideline adopted and reiterated by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, that the appropriate approach to follow must not be based on major changes to the refugee protection system but must be based instead on the application of the exceptions to the protection conferred by the Convention on refugees in the form of exclusion clauses. We share the opinion that these clauses must be used in accordance with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees’ own interpretation of them.
Finally, Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I should like to emphasise that the Commission subscribes to the European Parliament’s explicit call to reaffirm the Union’s policy that individuals cannot be extradited to countries where they could face the death penalty for their crimes and where there are no acceptable guarantees that can be legally enforced within the framework of a fair and equitable trial."@en1
|
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples