Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-09-23-Speech-1-083"
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"en.20020923.6.1-083"2
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"Mr President, on behalf of my colleague, Mrs Carmen Cerdeira, who has been the shadow rapporteur for this report and who regrets that she cannot be here today, I would like to explain the position of the Socialist Group.
You know – and I would like to give you an example – that more and more people within the European Union are crossing the borders of their States. In 1999, 250 million people did so. This situation means that citizens who are moving around run the risk of becoming victims of crime both inside and outside the territory of their States of residence, and this may be anything from robbery to, on occasions, terrorist crimes, a scourge which still strikes cruelly within the European Union.
There is no doubt that this Green Paper and the reports we are approving today represent progress in terms of removing the physical national borders in relation to the victims of crime. We must ensure that within the Union’s area of freedom, security and justice the citizens are given genuine access to justice so that they may benefit from adequate legal protection in any part of the Union’s territory. For this reason, the Europe of the citizens does not make sense unless we first adopt, amongst others, the necessary measures to improve and take account of the rights of the victims of crime as well, seen from a global perspective.
Any person, including third-country nationals, who has been a direct or indirect victim of a crime in the territory of any Member State of the Union must receive the same minimum level of treatment. The European Union cannot accept that a person may receive different treatment depending on the Member State within which they have been a victim of crime or depending on their nationality. My group believes that compensating victims is a fundamental aspect which must be at the heart of European cooperation in the fight against crime.
I welcome the Commission’s report and also the report by Mrs Angelilli, whom I congratulate on her attitude and availability. I believe that all the groups will be more or less in agreement with this report.
I would just like to mention a few of the points which we believe to be fundamental and which we would like to express our support for: the principle of non-discrimination included in paragraph 13; support for non-governmental organisations which work with victims on a daily basis; the conditions for dealing with and attending to victims, as I said earlier; the harmonisation of systems for compensating victims, established by the Member States, taking account of levels of income; the guarantee that all citizens and legal residents can receive compensation when they have been victims of crime, according to Community criteria. We therefore support the creation of a European body for victims, the creation of a European fund to guarantee the corresponding compensation of the victims of crimes and, of course, the establishment of harmonised forms in all the languages of the Union.
I believe that we will thereby have a proposal which represents a genuine step forward."@en1
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