Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-01-12-Speech-1-075"
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"en.20040112.7.1-075"2
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".
Mr President, a moment ago we talked about air safety. Now we are going to talk about maritime safety.
I will now move on to the third issue, relating to the transfer of ships between European Union registers. As well as the aspects relating to criminalisation – the treatment or punishment of certain actions in the field of sea pollution and dumping – we are going to discuss the transfer of cargo and passenger ships between Community registers.
Twelve years after the adoption of the current regulation, it is urgent – in accordance with our experiences and within the context of the imminent enlargement of our Community fleet – to update the oldest text of our acquis in the field of maritime safety.
According to the current regulation, only cargo ships can be included under certain conditions in the intended system. And the main objective of the Commission's proposal is for passenger ships also to benefit from quick transfer between the registers of Community States in a manner which is less burdensome for our operators, thereby improving the operation of the sector and making it more competitive. This will obviously be carried out while maintaining the high level of maritime safety resulting from the international conventions in this area.
In addition to this objective, the proposal intends to improve the circulation of information amongst maritime administrations in the States of the Union to better coordinate the system applicable to transfers between registers with the Community acquis, particularly with the Directives on controls by the port state and classification societies which we have adopted in the
packages.
The debate in the Council has demonstrated the consensus which exists on the need to strengthen their current system of change of register. The modifications contained in the text of the Council’s general guidelines of 5 December 2003 contribute to defining the scope of the Regulation and, by coordinating it better with the detention and denial of access procedures in the Directive on control by the port state. The Commission fully agrees with these proposals.
Mr President, with these two packages of measures, we are taking a final step in improving and strengthening maritime safety within the European Union, an area in which I believe we have made considerable progress during this legislature.
I would like once again to thank this Parliament for its systematic support for the measures we have been proposing and also for its cooperation and contribution of positive proposals throughout this time.
The package we are going to discuss today constitutes the penultimate phase and naturally supplements the work carried out over the last four years. I would like to remind the honourable Members that, in December 1999, we faced the
accident, a tragedy which you are all well aware of; then we had the
accident. As a result of these two accidents, the citizens of the different European countries have looked to Europe and demanded responses.
We have taken many very important steps, and I believe we can safely say that during this legislature there has been a revolution in maritime safety in the European Union and a spectacular improvement in the guarantees of protection for our coasts and our citizens. Today, Europe can say that it has a system which is at least equivalent to those of the best protected countries in the world, and now there is no country in the world with more stringent measures, unlike the situation four and a half years ago. The risks and the seas are different, but we finally have a genuinely ambitious and appropriate system.
We must continue to make progress and today we are going to debate a fundamental element in the mechanism to combat and prevent the pollution caused by ships, namely the system of sanctions for pollution offences for which a part of the directive establishes a framework, and then there is the instrument in the criminal field.
In March 2003, the Commission presented its proposed directive on ship-source pollution and the introduction of sanctions, including of a criminal nature, for pollution offences. Through this proposed directive, the Commission intends to essentially achieve three objectives: firstly, to define within Community law the concept of the illegal dumping of polluting substances in the sea; the proposal intends to incorporate into our legislation the provisions of the international convention for the prevention of pollution from ships, that is, the Marpol Convention. Secondly, to guarantee that the people responsible for illegal dumping – not just captains and ship owners, but also charterers and classification societies, which in some cases be responsible for these actions – may be prosecuted and also be subject to penalties in certain circumstances. And, thirdly, precisely defining the conditions under which responsibility may be established for each of the parties involved; the Commission believes that criminal responsibility may be established when spills are intentional and also, in the event of an accident, if the spill is due to serious negligence. In other words, intention and serious negligence.
As the honourable Members know, in May last year, the Commission also presented a proposed framework Decision on pollution from ships. This second proposal supplements the proposed Directive and essentially regulates the criminal aspects, that is, harmonisation in the field of sanctions and issues of judicial cooperation on criminal matters.
Now, the principle of incrimination and the imposition of the corresponding sanction must be established legally and, in the Commission’s view, by means of the directive, which, in accordance with the Treaties in their current form, is the only genuinely effective instrument for truly incorporating sanctions into the law of all the Member States and will therefore be an effective deterrent.
The three objectives I have referred to are clear, viable and, in our view, inescapable. Nevertheless, for certain Members States, the proposed Directive which is currently on the table goes too far: they see its objectives as overly ambitious. The Council has not yet laid out its position in this regard, but I have heard the doubts of the majority of ministers, who are not convinced that we should continue along this route. Some have the clear intention of greatly reducing the ambitions contained in the Commission’s proposed Directive.
I must confess that the work in the Council is a great disappointment to me. The work is moving very slowly and the delay has meant that we cannot respond either to the expectations of our fellow citizens or to the demands of the Heads of State or Government, who had called for Parliament and the Council to adopt this Directive before the end of 2003. I am convinced that I can once again count on the support of this House. The position Parliament adopts will be a determining factor and will contribute to moving the situation forwards."@en1
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