Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-01-14-Speech-3-284"
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"en.20040114.6.3-284"2
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"Mr President, as is customary I would like to begin my remarks by congratulating the rapporteur. This is done with a bit more sincerity than is sometimes the case as I can give great credit to Mr Pirker. If he had asked me whether it was possible to draft a report on immigration or asylum for our committee and win almost unanimous support for it, or bring it to plenary and find that with a few exceptions it was voted through, I would have said that would have been impossible. However, by sleight of hand and various other tactics, he seems to have managed to present something that is going to command support across Parliament. He deserves credit for that, as do the Commission and the Council for the way it has been presented and brought forward.
Mr Pirker and others have highlighted particular aspects and it would be easy to draw attention to them. Indeed, there is a lot to concentrate on, but I do hope that this report is seen as part of a wider package and that we do not lose sight of our overall aim of moving towards not only a common European policy on asylum but also, in parallel, a separate and equally important common European policy on legal immigration. This is reinforced in points 16 and 17.
I turn now to the aspect of external borders – points 2, 3, 4 and 5, etc. – and cooperation amongst Member States. I take issue with Mr Blokland and Mr Sørensen, who claim this is entirely a subsidiarity question. Everyone is affected by external borders, even in countries that do not have them. The very nature of migration is such that people do not stay in the first country they get to; they move around. So it is very important for all countries to cooperate and work together, especially, as Mr Pirker has highlighted, in an enlarged European Union of 25 Member States.
As we ponder all these issues, it is equally important that we look further afield to those countries just outside the European Union and bear in mind their situation, as well as that of countries further afield which are less prosperous and from which people, for a whole variety of reasons, try to move away. This picks up on a point also alluded to by Mrs Roure.
If priorities and finances were directed towards helping these less-developed countries and those in internal conflict, we might be doing as much to address the challenges of migration as we are in all the post-Seville and Thessaloniki projects that have been put into operation.
I welcome this report. It is a move in the right direction and I hope very much that it commands the support of Parliament tomorrow.
My final point is linguistic and I have made it before. I hope we can in future move away from the term 'burden-sharing' and adopt the term 'responsibility-sharing', because that, and cooperation, is what is involved here."@en1
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