Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-02-11-Speech-3-005"
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"Mr President, Commissioner, we are approaching the end of the five-year term established in Amsterdam. New provisions of the Treaty of Nice will enter into force, and enlargement will expand the territory included in the area of freedom, security and justice. It is therefore time to take stock, to assess the mandate – this first five-year period. The annual debate focuses on this area and this will also be the approach of the resolution that we are preparing for the end of March. This is the European Parliament’s first message: we want this assessment to be made – not only by us, but also by the Commission and the Council. Here we will kick things off and publish our own evaluation in due course. We know that the Commission is also preparing its assessment, which we look forward to seeing. We would strongly recommend that the Council does the same.
I ask for the forgiveness of the chairman of our Parliamentary committee, Mr Hernández Mollar, who will probably refer to this again and who had the idea and proposed it in our debate the day before yesterday. We argue that the Council should now start preparing seriously a Tampere II, a new European Summit specifically dedicated to the area of Justice and Home Affairs, in which this political assessment is undertaken in a serious and transparent way, without people harbouring reservations. We also call for a new and realistic programme to be defined for the medium term. This must be done under the Dutch Presidency, in the second half of this year or, at the latest, under Luxembourg’s Presidency in the first half of 2005.
And we need this balance-sheet, one drawn up by all three elements of our institutional triangle, primarily so that we can then move ahead with political discernment and with new strategic direction. We need a dynamic balance-sheet; one that assesses the current situation and reaches towards the future. I would say the first requirement is for a positive assessment of many of the developments already achieved in this five-year period. We realise that the area of freedom, security and justice is an entirely new concept and a new direction for the Union’s development. It is therefore important to make a clear and positive assessment of the progress that has been made. On occasion, the understandable dissatisfaction of many is misunderstood by the general public. The wish to have gone further is frequently expressed; it is taken to suggest failure and gives rise to feelings that the situation is in crisis, which do not reflect the true picture.
We must remember that the general public is one of our greatest allies, and in order to involve it more closely in this process we also have to give this general public knowledge and trust instead of only frustration or utopian ideals. Hence, first of all, the future strategic importance that I attach to a more intense policy of providing information in this field. If we ask the Council to come up with a Tampere II, however, it is also because we feel that Tampere I, in 1999, was of great value and I therefore wish to congratulate Commissioner Vitorino, because I know how much Tampere owes to his efforts. It is true that much remains to be done, but the Tampere methodology, if we can call it that, was in itself positive, a framework for this parliamentary term, because without Tampere we would now be much worse off and further behind.
To give a broad outline and without going into the details of the motion for a resolution that we are working on and without returning to the terms of the oral question – this will certainly be done by my fellow Members of other political hues – a general assessment could be made, ranging from ‘very positive’ as regards the progress made in cooperation in judicial and civil matters, to ‘almost total stagnation’ in the field of police cooperation, with ‘good’ and ‘bad’ or simply ‘tolerable’ in between, applied to the progress and delays in the fields of asylum and immigration and judicial cooperation in criminal matters.
There is also very powerful and growing concern about guaranteeing fundamental rights, together with stepping up police and judicial cooperation, and there are growing calls for policies for integration in the field of immigration. There is first and foremost, however, a general message that could be sent to the Council and to all governments. This is a message that can be drawn clearly from these last five years and in the debates that have taken place: unless, in the remaining areas covered by the intergovernmental method, open and effective cooperation between governments and all the national authorities involved does not progress at the pace that circumstances require, public opinion will exert direct pressure for these competences and fields to be brought gradually within the Community sphere of competence, in some cases for reasons of security, in others for reasons relating to individual freedoms. In other words, if governments use their powers not only to fine-tune, adjust, calibrate and incorporate the principle of subsidiarity, but to block and hinder the development of this area of freedom, security and justice, they will be pursuing a very ill-advised approach. By waiting for so long, they will ultimately lose everything, because there are few areas in which the citizens exert as much pressure as in this one and in which this pressure makes itself felt so markedly and so powerfully.
Nor can we compromise by refusing to discharge budgets because, as Romano Prodi, our President, has already said, all Union policies would suffer as a result, starting with the area of freedom, security and justice. I wish to say a final word, Mr President, on dialogue with national parliaments, a point already made in last year’s annual report by the then rapporteur, Baroness Ludford. Our experience of this five-year period suggests that we in Parliament must also speed up the working processes and I have thus proposed that in the next parliamentary term, the Committee on Citizens’ Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs should adopt a working figurehead, the benefits of which I have seen in the Committee on Constitutional Affairs. We must also invite representatives of the national parliaments, of their corresponding committees, to come and participate in our work and discussions. In my view, we should do this in three situations: first, regularly once every six months, secondly, when we prepare our annual debate and thirdly, when a debate is held on a legislative matter that is either of particular strategic importance to pushing through the entire area of freedom, security and justice, or which is rooted in its decision-making process and in which it is useful, in order to uproot it, to extend the Trans-European debate. Lastly, there is a powerful proactive generic recommendation: everything that has been planned must be implemented. We would like everything that has fallen behind the timetables that have been set to be concluded by the end of 2004. We believe that, when Tampere II takes place, Tampere I should have already been fully completed. Perhaps this is not possible at the moment, but this is the direction we propose in order to remove all doubts from people’s minds."@en1
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