Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-04-20-Speech-2-019"
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"en.20040420.2.2-019"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, the report resulting from the work of the Temporary Committee is ultimately rather unconvincing. What was surely needed was to carry out an exhaustive and rigorous review of the many weak links remaining in the chain of maritime safety, one that would be capable of producing operational guidelines linked together according to the different areas of competence, including the intermediate European level.
Certainly, many good intentions are expressed. The report, as amended, thus favours preventive action and calls for the joint construction of large anti-pollution vessels and the permanent equipping of fishing fleets with fuel recovery trawls. These are good guidelines. I should point out that a tonne of fuel recovered at sea represents ten tonnes of waste fewer to be treated.
The report also favours the setting up of particularly sensitive sea areas under the auspices of the IMO, which is what France wants. It is opposed to flags of convenience that do not meet the vessel inspection and safety standards. This is certainly a very sound reminder at a time when the European Union is itself becoming the world’s leading host for flags of convenience.
Very soon, however, the report cannot stop itself drifting off towards a series of federalist fads. For example, when it aims to encourage replacing Member States with the European Union at the IMO or to develop the inspection and restraint powers of the European Maritime Safety Agency, to the point of transforming it into a veritable federal authority; or again when it advocates the establishment of an integrated European coastguard system, while being very careful not to specify who would finance it and who would be in charge of it, but which would nevertheless have numerous functions, including, in no particular order, ensuring maritime safety and the protection of the marine environment, fisheries surveillance, protection against terrorism or even the assignment of emergency moorings and ports in the event of an accident at sea.
Finally, the icing on the cake is paragraph 39 at the heart of the report, which by the way completely contradicts paragraph 40, and which condemns the only measure of immediate application taken following the
shipwreck, that is very strict control of high-risk vessels, which could result in their expulsion outside the 200-mile zone, decided on jointly by France and Spain in Malaga. This device has nevertheless produced very good results. Of more than sixty in-depth checks carried out so far by the French, one vessel made a gallant last stand, and sixteen were expelled. The prospect of being ordered to make very expensive detours is clearly an effective deterrent to the use of dangerous vessels. Vessels in distress are obviously not covered by this procedure, as this report nevertheless pretends to believe.
In the final analysis, therefore, the Sterckx report leaves a strange feeling. What credibility should be given to it when, instead of advocating, as one might logically have expected, the widespread application of measures proven in practice to be the most effective against the hooligans of the seas and the greatest deterrent to them, it condemns them on the basis of the other inaccurate considerations, on the pretext that they do not come from European institutions but are the result of close cooperation between Member States directly concerned?
Ideology does indeed make you blind. On the pretext of increasing safety, here we have a suggestion to decrease safety by challenging the right of the Member States most directly affected by maritime risks to provide effective protection for their coasts and their coastal populations. Instead of being encouraged to continue, they are being discouraged from doing it. Instead of good practices being applied more generally, they are – I quote – ‘rejected’, a quite paradoxical result, Mr President, for a committee set up for the purpose of proposing measures to improve safety at sea."@en1
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