Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-02-11-Speech-2-056"
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"en.20030211.3.2-056"2
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"Mr President, ever since the Tampere Summit of European Union leaders in 1999, the issue of formulating common policies in Europe to tackle illegal immigration has been high on the agenda of our institutions. The bottom line is that we live in a European Union where there is a system of free movement of services, capital, goods and persons.
The European Union, as we all know, has a population of 370 million and, with enlargement, the Union's population will rise to 500 million. It is not only a question of dealing with the rights of European Union citizens working in different European Union countries, it is equally about formulating common policies to deal with people who seek to enter the European Union as asylum-seekers or refugees, or those who fall into the bracket of economic migrants.
We need to address how we protect the external borders of the European Union. Trafficking in human beings is now the world's fastest growing criminal business. The attempts that have been made at European level to tackle this problem are inadequate. We have also sadly witnessed many tragedies in recent times, as persons seeking to enter the European Union have died in awful circumstances.
The battle to defeat the scourge of trafficking in human beings must be tackled at European Union level in a coordinated and structured manner. Organised criminal gangs with vast resources that are illegally trafficking human beings into the European Union cannot be allowed, under any circumstances, to operate with impunity.
On a separate but related matter, it is certainly the case that the working group on freedom, security and justice at the European Convention has brought forward some interesting proposals in this area. There are certainly many people who believe that qualified majority voting and codecision procedures should be used to tackle immigration issues.
There is also a belief that the objective of a common policy on immigration should be enshrined in the proposed new treaty. This is certainly going to focus the minds of those drafting this treaty over the coming months and in the run-up to the next Intergovernmental Conference. However, the proposal that judicial cooperation in the field of civil matters should be governed by qualified majority voting is contentious. For example, Ireland and Britain have common law systems in operation, but many other European Union states have a civil law structure. This is an area that is going to have to be given the closest attention."@en1
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