Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-11-18-Speech-1-101"
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"en.20021118.5.1-101"2
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". – Let me first of all deal with some of the technical issues. Looking at the important question of the Commission's attitude to the various amendments, there are 26 amendments being proposed. The Commission can accept amendments 3, 10, 22 and 26 in full and amendments 8, 11 and 17 subject to some minor rewording. All the others, the Commission rejects.
So what do I say to those Members of Parliament who are undecided about this? I would say to them they should follow the views that are expressed by the Court. Follow the advice of the Commission. Follow the views of the experts in this House, the Committee on the Environment, and follow the first thoughts of the rapporteur. Think to what extent will Parliament be on its own if it either votes down this legislation or votes it through with the kind of amendments that are being proposed. It might not be quite alone, but it will be alone with one Member State, the Member State that happens to have the highest consumption of tobacco amongst adults in the European Union.
That is the choice and therefore I would suggest to those who are undecided on this issue how you should cast your vote. I would suggest you cast it in a way that puts people's health first, rather than becoming engaged in a pointless debate about the legal niceties when the issues have been resolved by the Court of Justice and those who have examined this issue closely and believe that legal certainty does exist, to the extent that is necessary to support legislation designed to protect public health, as Articles 95 and 152 say. Both the Commission and Parliament have a duty and an obligation, in this decision-making and law-making, to promote the highest levels of public health.
Throughout this debate, we have heard from many speakers and it is quite clear there are different views. Indeed there are different views in Member States. They have in fact sought to regulate the advertising of tobacco products. I am convinced that there is a correlation between the legal rules in Member States on advertising and the figures for adult consumption of tobacco in those Member States. If you look at one of the Member States with the highest level of tobacco consumption, Germany, with 37%, it has a fairly lax approach to advertising in its national law, as compared with Sweden, one of the Member States with the most restrictive advertising legislation. Sweden's rate of adult tobacco consumption is 19%. So there is quite clearly, in my view, a correlation. A number of you spoke about that in your contributions. It is a question of attacking the image of smoking.
Mrs Alvarez Gonzalez referred to the different views of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy and the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market, the Environment Committee's desire for public health to be promoted as an important basic consideration in determining these issues. Those who spoke on the other side of the argument, if I might describe it as such, are seeking to have legal certainty, which, as a lawyer, I would say is not at all unreasonable. It is an objective that I would seek to pursue myself, not just as a lawyer but as one of my responsibilities as a Commissioner.
We have done that. We examined very closely the judgment of the Court of Justice in the first advertising directive case. When the Court looked at the facts of that case and gave its judgment, it clearly said that there were good parts in the legislation and bad parts. It went on to say that because they were so inextricably bound together, to attempt to extract the good from the bad, to retain the good and eliminate the bad, would amount to legislating by the judiciary and that cannot be done. That is why the legislation was annulled. I brought the judgment back to Brussels. I told my staff to follow it closely and we brought a new draft regulation. Referring only briefly to one part of the Court's judgment, paragraph 98 says in principle that a directive prohibiting the advertising of tobacco products in periodicals, magazines and in newspapers could be adopted on the basis of Article No. 100a – now Article 95 – of the Treaty with a view to ensuring the free movement of press products on the lines of Article 13 of Directive 89/552, the television without frontiers directive prohibiting television advertising of tobacco products in order to promote the free broadcasting of television programmes. The Court has spoken clearly on the subject. We have followed that carefully in our drafting.
In response to Mr Lechner, who said earlier that there was no evidence of a distortion in the market, I must say that there is plenty of evidence of this. In the Commission we get letters regularly from people complaining from both sides of the argument, indeed even from the industry, about a distortion in the market because of the different regimes in Member States in relation to this issue.
Mr De Clercq made reference to the movement away from Spa of the Formula 1 championship race. That is another clear distortion of the market, because Belgium brought in a law which they are saying forces them to move away from Belgium. That supports my argument that we need to have a level playing field in Europe. We need to have harmonised legislation on this issue throughout the European Union so that one Member State cannot be played off against another.
This is also my answer to Mr Harbour. It is not a subsidiarity issue for the very reason that a Belgian has been pinpointed in a particular way and has suffered a loss.
So not only does the Court say it can be done, the Commission says it ought to be done. But do not just take my word for it. The Committee on the Environment Committee says that we should have this legislation in the way I have described and I am sure it would agree the few amendments that the Commission concedes. Even when we look at the first report from the very hardworking Mr Medina Ortega, the rapporteur, there were three suggested amendments and I would have accepted any one of the three. If I read between the lines of what he has said, and forgive me if I misinterpreting him, I certainly got the impression from his reference to the compromised amendments that he was not speaking with great enthusiasm but was identifying the fact that this House was divided. Of course, it is. So maybe we can draw the conclusion that the first thoughts of the rapporteur on this issue, which are closer to those of the Committee on the Environment and to mine, might well be the ones to follow in this debate.
Let us not leave it there. We have had a number of discussions on tobacco in the Council, including the preliminary discussions on the framework convention on tobacco control, and the breakdown there is 14 to one. One Member State takes the view that this legislation either should not go through or it should go through in such a form and with such amendments that in my opinion the heart is cut out of the legislation or amendments are added that leave it vulnerable to challenge in the Court of Justice yet again."@en1
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