Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-07-02-Speech-3-030"
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"en.20030702.1.3-030"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I would first like to reply to Mr Poettering, who was waxing positively lyrical about the Presidency representatives who have travelled from Italy today: Berlusconi, Fini, Frattini, Buttiglione – I was even worried that he was going to move on to Maldini, Del Piero, Garibaldi and Cavour! But there is one person he forgot, and that is Mr Bossi. He is also a member of the Italian Government, and the least utterance from this man is far worse than anything that inspired this House to censure Austria and oppose the Freedom Party's inclusion in the Austrian Government. We ought to talk about him as well!
I realise that you are not responsible for your ministers' IQs, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, but you are responsible for what they say. The comments made by Mr Bossi, your Minister for Immigration Policy, which you mentioned in your speech, are totally incompatible with the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights. As President-in-Office of the Council, it falls to you to defend those values, so I call on you to defend those values against your own minister!
I would like to pick up on a point made here by Mr Di Pietro. He said that we should not allow conflict of interest to infect Europe. Yes, he is quite right, and we have now found ourselves in a difficult situation for some days in this House whenever we talk about the Italian Presidency, because we keep being told, ‘now you must be careful not to criticise Berlusconi because of what he is doing in Italy, because the European Parliament is not the right place for that’. Why should that be? Is Italy not a member of the European Union?
Of course the European Parliament is the right place, and I shall tell you why. The members of Italy's Parliament are elected to concern themselves with your actions as the Prime Minister of Italy, and we are elected to debate what you do as President of the European Council; that is our responsibility. You talked about the area of freedom, security and justice, and about the Tampere process. You used a single term, Europol, but you did not use those three terms. I wanted to remind you about that and ask if you could say a few words about those three concepts. What do you intend to do to speed up the establishment of a European Public Prosecutor's office?
What do you intend to do to speed up the introduction of the European arrest warrant? What are you planning to do about the mutual recognition of documents in cross-border criminal proceedings? I think you could do with a little reform in your own country when it comes to the authenticity of documents. If you were to implement that reform in your own country, the European arrest warrant could then come into force much more quickly.
Nevertheless, I am delighted that you are with us today and that I can have this debate with you. We owe that not least to Mrs Nicole Fontaine, because if she had not made such a good job of dragging out the Berlusconi and Dell'Utri immunity procedures – Mr Dell'Utri being your right-hand man, who by way of exception is here today for once – if she had not done that, you would no longer have the immunity that you need. That is another truth that needs to be spoken here today!"@en1
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