Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-05-13-Speech-2-025"
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"en.20030513.2.2-025"2
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"Mr President, the directive we are about to vote on can and must be clearly perceived as a turning point by the European citizens. Seveso, the disasters, with which we are sadly, all familiar, in the Natural Park of Doñana and the sinking of the oil tanker, the
and, last but not least, the confirmation of the devastating future health implications of the environmental degradation caused by the Priolo chemical plant, are all incidents which call for the establishment of a European system of civil liability for environmental damage.
We need to send out a strong political signal, which will help, not least, to stop some regressive tendencies which are emerging here and there. As Mrs Wallström, for example, is quite aware, the Italian Government is about to undertake a revision of the penal code, planning
to remove the penalties for crimes against the environment. Therefore, there is all the more need for a system rigorously applying the polluter pays principle and thus creating powerful incentives for preventing and avoiding the repetition of such situations in the future. Indeed, the ultimate goal is prevention, not the provision of compensation for damage.
To this end, we in the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy have endeavoured to achieve the removal of some of the dangerous exemptions which allow wide-ranging, general means of protection and which, in actual fact, turn the environmental authorisations into a sort of licence to pollute, with the serious danger that the effectiveness of the proposed legislative system will be nullified. We have tried to ensure that it is the operator responsible, not the taxpayer, who bears the costs of remedying the environmental damage.
It is, moreover, necessary for all the economic activities which could result in environmental damage to be taken into consideration and provided for in the liability system. This system should lay down, as a general rule, specific liability for environmental damage, irrespective of whether the activity causing the damage is deemed to be dangerous or not.
This directive is vitally important. Now long-awaited, it will be a fundamental element of European environmental legislation, provided, however, that the changes which we have worked on with the 16 compromise amendments to reinforce the text are adopted. I strongly urge you to adopt the compromise amendments, which repropose the substance of the text that was adopted in the Committee on the Environment and then nullified by the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market; if the amendments are not adopted, as Mrs Gebhardt has already said, particularly if Amendments Nos 99, 103 and 107 are not adopted, our group will not be able to vote for the Manders report."@en1
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