Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-10-23-Speech-3-183"
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"en.20021023.4.3-183"2
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"Madam President, Commissioner, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, ladies and gentlemen, Parliament has spent a year undertaking an exhaustive piece of work in the Committee which I had the privilege of chairing. Many experts were heard, many visits were made and countless documents were studied, culminating in the excellent report by Mr Gerhard Schmid, whose conclusions were approved by an enormous majority in this Parliament.
Almost all of our work was conducted in public, with a few rare exceptions in which the nature of the actions or the bodies being heard required this to take place behind closed doors. We concluded that an ‘Echelon’ network must exist, able to intercept and process communications, involving the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. We clearly stated our concern about the low level of protection given to our individual freedoms against this threat, about the security of communications sent and received by our businesses, and even about ‘fair trade’ in the international market.
Furthermore, in this plenary, we adopted 44 recommendations intended mainly for the Council, the Commission and the Member States. My feeling is that everyone has chosen to forget this report and its conclusions. I can, first of all, only deplore the decision by Parliament’s Bureau not to promote the publication of the report. And, returning to the Council and the Commission, it is time to state clearly that little activity has been seen this year. Our situation today vis-à-vis the citizens and our businesses is not substantially different to that of a year ago. We have even seen a trend that we must definitely combat – and on this matter I must highlight the intervention by Mr Haarder in the previous debate – which is to suggest that the fight against international crime and terrorism is necessarily undertaken at the cost of our freedoms.
I must repeat and emphasise that security is a tool with which to protect our freedom, but when security requirements stifle freedoms we are betraying our fundamental values and fall into tyranny. I hope that, a year from now, we do not have to come once again before the Council, the Commission and the Member States, and repeat what we have said today: that little has been done and that almost everything is as it was before."@en1
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