Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-04-08-Speech-2-278"
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"en.20030408.8.2-278"2
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Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, first of all I should like to congratulate Mr Turco and Mr von Boetticher on the reports they have drawn up, which aim at analysing the initiatives taken by certain Member States both to improve the operation of Europol and to align the classification levels of Europol documents with the classification levels of Council documents. The Commission shares Mr Turco’s opinion that it would be difficult for European Union citizens to understand that the classification system of Europol documents should be different from the classification system of European Union documents. As a result of this initiative, Europol would have four levels of classification corresponding to those adopted in the Council decision of 19 March 2001 and the Commission decision of 29 November 2001. Mr Turco refers in his report to Council Regulation No 1049/2001.
I should like to call this House’s attention to the fact that this regulation addresses the question of public access to documents. It is not, however, a regulation that sets the levels of classification of Council or Commission documents. With regard to the rules on public access to documents held by Europol, Members are certainly aware that the Danish initiative provides that Europol’s Management Board should adopt rules on access to Europol documents taking into consideration the principles and limits laid down in Regulation No 1049/2001. In the Commission’s opinion, this means that officially Europol’s Management Board only has to adopt such rules when the Danish initiative is ratified. Nevertheless, given the importance of this issue, I should like to stress that in our view there is nothing to stop Europol from acting straight away to adopt rules on document access that take Regulation No 1049/2001 into consideration, as suggested by the rapporteur.
With regard to Mr von Boetticher’s report, the objectives of this initiative are to define the competences of Europol better, to make Europol the point of contact in the European Union for issues relating to the counterfeiting of the euro, to improve contacts between Europol and the Member States’ police forces, and lastly to provide a better basis for informing the European Parliament about Europol activities.
It is clear to me that these initiatives we are discussing do not solve the basic problems raised regarding the status of Europol. I am of the opinion, however, that they are moving in the right direction. I do, of course, understand Parliament’s position of wanting to show its disagreement with the insufficiency of the solutions by recommending that the initiatives by the four Member States should be rejected. But it must be remembered that the questions raised by these initiatives are at the same time being examined by the Convention on the Future of Europe. Rejection of these initiatives would probably be a bad sign for change in the right direction. I believe Parliament agrees with the Commission that the Europol Convention needs to be replaced with an instrument that is more easily adapted and allows for adequate legal and democratic control at a European level. The Europol Convention should be replaced right now, today, through a Council decision, just as Eurojust was set up on the basis of a Council decision.
Europol’s budget should be financed from the Community budget, and the information given to the European Parliament should likewise be looked at from a different viewpoint. In fact, in the communication that the Commission presented to Parliament on the democratic control of Europol, we recommended that a joint supervisory body should be set up composed of representatives of the European Parliament and of the national parliaments. Lastly, as regards the field of data protection, the rules that exist in the current Europol Convention must be extended.
These objectives are only very partially achieved by the Member States’ initiatives. As Mr von Boetticher has just pointed out, however, the Convention on the Future of Europe is right now discussing a draft article on Europol which, as I see it, addresses precisely the concerns I have just mentioned. This should not, however, prevent the adoption of the initiative by Denmark. It is true – and I recognise Mr von Boetticher is right – that the ratification process for this Convention is going to be slow and cumbersome because we know that all conventions under Title 6 of the Treaty have been extremely slow and cumbersome. We only have to recall that the Convention on the Protection of the European Communities’ Financial Interests was ratified by all the European Union Member States only last month, yet it dates back to 1995. This is a good reason for getting rid of the ‘convention’ instrument within the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice.
We should not forget, however, that the outcome of the Convention on the Future of Europe, that is, the Constitutional Treaty, will also be subject to a process of ratification by the parliaments of all the Member States, all twenty-five Member States, and will therefore be a similarly slow and cumbersome process. The immediate triggering of the ratification process for these amendments to the Europol Convention does not conflict with the Constitutional Treaty, since the rules of the Constitutional Treaty will prevail over the rules that are now the subject of this initiative by the Member States.
Finally, I should like to express my support for Parliament’s position when, in the recommendation to the Council, it refers to Article 22 presented by the Convention Praesidium. I should like to point out that the objective with which the Commission has approached the debate on the Convention is to make Europol an agency of the European Union with a normal statute within a single institutional framework. This means Community financing, a legal basis that can be changed more easily, a European Union law and the use of the normal legislative procedure, that is, the qualified majority and codecision rule. All these elements are welcome; they are in line with the Commission communication of December 2002 on the institutional architecture of the European Union and I believe they fit in with the objectives of more effective police cooperation in the European area."@en1
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