Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-03-09-Speech-2-065"

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"en.20040309.5.2-065"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, the problem of giving preferential treatment to exports from Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip has now been with us for nearly 30 years and has been the subject of regular oral and written questions and debates in the European Parliament. Most recently, in a debate in November 2003 we reaffirmed that a solution finally needed to be found in order to bring Israel's repeated violations of international law to an end. Because of its practice of labelling products from the occupied territories as ‘Made in Israel’, Israel is not only violating the provisions on the territorial scope of the agreement, notably Article 83, the rules on origin and the provisions on cooperation and mutual assistance between administrative authorities in customs matters, but in doing so it is continuing to display its total contempt for international agreements and for international law. The problem is, however, now more pressing than ever before. The European Union is planning to include Israel in the preferential treatment system of pan-European accumulation, which in this case means making corresponding changes to the EC-Israel Association Agreement. If that were to happen without the illegal application of the rules on origin for settlement products being corrected, it would imply acceptance of such illegal application. The European Union would accordingly be permanently depriving itself of the right finally to insist on legal application of the rules for preferential treatment of exports. The preferential treatment of export products from the occupied territories is, however, not only illegal and in breach of international law, it also means that the Member States continue to be faced with the thorny problem of controls and of achieving some degree of uniform treatment. Although the Commission has attempted to find a remedy, the problem has so far not been solved at all. The Commission has quite rightly informed the Israeli authorities that measures must be taken promptly to halt this illegal practice. Before there can be any further talk about amending the EC-Israel Association Agreement, I would like to call upon the Commission, as a matter of urgency, to resolve this situation before the end of its term of office. This is a very important issue, Commissioner, because it needs to go hand in hand with the amendment of the Association Agreement. The Commission should consult Parliament on this and thus prevent a situation arising, through inaction and a lack of political will, in which illegality is legalised."@en1
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