Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-05-13-Speech-2-018"
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"en.20030513.2.2-018"2
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"Mr President, the proposal for a directive on environmental liability which has been presented to us today is a big disappointment to us. Certainly we want to see European harmonisation in the area of damage caused to the environment, which is often cross-border in nature, but it is also necessary that the directive should represent serious progress.
It features an impressive number of omissions, exemptions, exclusions and limitations of liability, however, which would turn the new rules into an illusion, and often even an opportunity for confusion and for backing away from the objective of protecting the public, unless the taxpayer is called on to make good the deficits. I can give you two examples to illustrate this point. The first example is that, in Article 3, we discover that the directive would not apply to the carriage by sea of hazardous substances, to the damage caused by oil pollution and to the damage caused by nuclear activities. The grounds for this omission are that there already exist international conventions which deal with civil liability in all these areas. However, these conventions are limited in scope, give insufficient protection or are totally inadequate, as we have seen recently in the case of the derisory compensation awarded by the IOPCF following the
disaster. Consequently we are demanding that this directive should not shy away from the problem, but that it should deal with it, and provide real protection.
The second example is that of GMOs. When the directive on the deliberate release of GMOs was being discussed, the Commission promised us that the issues of liability and insurance would be dealt with in the general directive on environmental liability, in other words the directive that we are discussing here today. However, we have been deceived. GMOs are certainly covered by this proposal in theory, but under Article 9, which exempts those activities which have been given official authorisation, a category which includes GMOs, they fall within the scope of the directive on deliberate release.
All this is quite intolerable, particularly at a time when the Commission is seeking to unload onto Member States the problem of the co-existence of GMO and non-GMO crops, which is something that it wants to authorise. In these conditions, we are asking the Council not to remove the moratorium until the issues of liability and insurance in the case of GMOs are clearly resolved in a way that gives optimum protection to the public and to the environment."@en1
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