Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-09-23-Speech-1-076"
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"en.20020923.6.1-076"2
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".
Mr President, the report of which I am about to give a brief overview deals with the Commission Green Paper on compensation to crime victims. This is certainly an extremely complex issue in legal terms, but I am glad to say that a major debate is developing on the matter with endeavours being made, first and foremost, to define the appropriate legislative instruments and identify the appropriate financial resources to secure what should be the basic right of a crime victim: to receive proper compensation for suffering and damages inflicted, especially where there is no perpetrator of the crime in that the author is unknown or is not in a position to provide the victim with compensation.
Moreover, we know that the number of cross-border crime victims is increasing, firstly because of the increase in the movement of citizens within the Union but also, I regret to say, because of a general increase in crime, particularly in major, very serious criminal activities such as terrorism, child abuse and the trafficking of human beings. It should be emphasised, moreover, that many victims suffer injury twice, first as the victims of a crime and then as victims of an excessively bureaucratic system, and this system requires greater simplification in order to prevent situations where protection is unavailable or inadequate.
In view of this, the need to set minimum standards on the protection of the victims of crimes, in particular on crime victims' access to justice and on their right to compensation, was explicitly established as early as Tampere when the principal guidelines to be followed with a view to creating a genuine area of freedom, security and justice were laid down. Regrettably, this strong political will has not yielded any significant legislative results at Community level in the time that has elapsed since 1999. The primary goal is, therefore, to create minimum common standards in as short a time as possible in order to make the right to compensation reality throughout European Union territory for both European citizens and those who are legally resident in Europe.
These standards must contain a clear, precise definition which has been agreed upon by all the Member States of the types of crime and the damages that could be grounds for compensation. It will, moreover, be equally necessary to identify the parties who could legally be the recipients of compensation with similar precision and on the basis of similar assent, considering
that the families and dependents of people injured by crime can be considered to be the indirect victims of crimes.
It will certainly be no easy matter to identify minimum standards, for two reasons. The first relates to the practical problem posed by legal codification, for a complex process will have to be launched to approximate the – at present, extremely diverse – laws of the Member States. The second concerns the vital need to identify adequate resources. A number of different funding possibilities exist. We could consider, as the Commission suggests, setting up a special European Solidarity Fund, which could, moreover, contain the proceeds of the seizure and subsequent sale of the assets of criminal networks.
In any case, the priority must be to define rules and procedures governing the treatment of victims which are as harmonised as possible. All this would help to remedy the – at times, extraordinary
disparities which exist between the different legal systems of the Member States. Indeed, at present, there are differences linked to the place of residence of the victim or to the State in which the crime was committed, which means that discrimination is occurring which is unacceptable and prejudicial to the victims. In practice, a situation is created where there is real disparity between the treatment people receive, which varies according to the country in which the crime took place, and this is a blatant violation of the fundamental principle of non-discrimination."@en1
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