Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-04-01-Speech-4-015"
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"en.20040401.2.4-015"2
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".
Thank you, Mr President; I would like to start by stressing that the statement that Commissioner Verheugen has just made on the future prospects for the European Union is entirely in accord with the opinions of the majority of the Christian Democrats in this House. I find this a valuable observation.
From the point of view of regional and transport policy, Turkey cannot, in fact, be said to have made any progress whatever. What is particularly deserving of criticism in terms of regional policy is that decentralised structures have still not yet been set up. We, however, regard such structures as indispensable; we need them in order to be able to ensure the proper and comprehensible distribution of EU funds for regional support or cohesion policy. The Turks cannot be serious in constantly asking for more money when the administration is not in a position to disburse these funds in a proper and transparent manner.
Where everything really is wrong in Turkey is in transport policy. In none of the transport sectors is anything being done towards alignment on the EU’s law and standards. Everywhere, there are still shocking deficiencies: in safety and air traffic control, on the railways, in the maritime sector, and in road transport. One particular deficiency in the road transport sector is in social regulations, one good example being those on driving and rest times, in the training of drivers, and especially, again, in safety. That is a pretty critical point; there are, for example, a lot of dangerous goods transported by road, and such deficits in road transport present dangers to transport not only within Turkey, but also, and to an increasing extent, across the European Union. There is an urgent need for action here.
The biggest scandal, though – and it really is one – is the fact that Turkey is on the black list of states lacking any genuine port state control, in other words, that many of the ships that are death-traps and thus a ticking time bomb in our waters, sail under the Turkish flag. That is as unworthy of a candidate for accession as it is of any other country in the world, but the situation is particularly intolerable in the case of a candidate for accession to the European Union.
Until such time as Turkey has in place a national programme to remedy all these defects, we have to have serious doubts about its willingness to start accepting our rules. None of these things are, of course, pre-accession criteria, but not one single point of these has been complied with either. All these things take time. This makes all the more incomprehensible the Turkish insistence, dating back years, on a date for the opening of accession negotiations. This does nobody any favours – whether the European Union or Turkey itself."@en1
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