Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-10-13-Speech-3-103"
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"en.20041013.6.3-103"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, this will probably be my last speech in this House as Commissioner for Justice and Home Affairs. I should like to take this opportunity to thank Parliament, and in particular the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs and its chairman, Mr Bourlanges, for its constant support in developing the Tampere Agenda over the past five years.
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I would therefore like to leave you with the message that I am sure that, with the acknowledged efficiency of the Dutch Presidency and with Parliament’s extremely substantial and welcome contribution, the multi-annual programme for the next five years will be taken forward successfully by my successor, whom I wish every success in building Europe as an area of freedom, security and justice. Thank you very much.
My participation today in this debate is extremely simple, because I could limit myself to saying that I welcome the resolution tabled by Mr Bourlanges, virtually in its entirety. This would help me beat the brevity record to which you referred, Mr President, but being so brief would naturally set a terrible precedent for my fellow Commissioners.
I shall add just three brief points. The first of these, to which you have just alluded, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, is that I feel that the next European Council should celebrate the decision that Article 67 of the current Treaty can be implemented in full, so that a range of issues can be put to the vote, by codecision and by majority, as the Treaties already allow at the moment. This decision will raise Parliament’s political profile, and will safeguard the principle of democratic legitimacy, which is crucial to introducing provisions in such sensitive areas as immigration policy, asylum policy and policies involving the citizens’ fundamental rights. I welcome the initiatives taken by the Dutch Presidency in this regard and I hope that they will be successful at the European Council of 5 November.
My second point concerns the question of priorities. A five-year multi-annual plan runs the risk of gradually taking on the appearance of a Christmas tree; everybody wants to see in it a little of what is closest to his heart. This programme needs a clear political profile, and that political profile must be the result of setting out a crucial number of priorities in such a way that people can understand them. I feel that Mr Bourlanges has touched a raw nerve.
It strikes me that the main priority at the moment is to step up cooperation at operational level – cooperation between security forces, between police forces and between judiciaries – in the fight against terrorism. We shall only be effective if we can build up an atmosphere of trust between the 25 Member States, which will help the security forces to cooperate more effectively in preventing terrorist attacks and in the fight against terrorism in general.
I feel that the second priority is the question of transposing legislation that has been passed into national legislation. A significant body of legislation has been produced over the past five years. The deadlines for transposing that legislation into the national legal order of each of the Member States must now be met and the mechanisms for ensuring the quality of that transposition must be safeguarded; in other words, national laws that give practical form to European laws must remain faithful to the spirit of the European laws and be subject to necessary and adequate quality control.
I believe that it is important, Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, for Parliament to send out a strong message to the Members of the European Council. Indeed, the Commission, for its part, set out its priorities clearly in the communication that we sent out in June of this year. In the dialogue with the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs and the Committee on Legal Affairs, we were able to enter into greater detail on these matters. What I should like to reiterate, therefore, in this final debate, is that what the Commission has found – based on the public consultation that we have carried out, and in the process of tabling our own proposals – is that the citizens have three fundamental concerns. The first is that priority should be given, on the one hand, to civil and commercial justice, to cooperation in the field of criminal justice, and to the fight against terrorism, and, on the other, to joint criminal trials that ensure compliance with the values of the democratic rule of law and to pro-active action in protecting all victims of crime and, in particular, victims of terrorism.
The second concern is a strong desire to see the completion of the second stage of developing a European asylum system based on common procedure and on a common statute for recognising refugees and asylum seekers. Thirdly and lastly, there is clear concern over security issues. While the citizens have shown that they recognise Europe’s added value in the fight against terrorism, there is work still to do as regards demonstrating the importance of certain common instruments that have been created, such as Europol and Eurojust, and the need to ensure that, in the fight against organised crime and terrorism, the legislation that has been introduced guarantees that the general public’s fundamental rights and personal information will be protected.
I shall conclude, Mr President, by saying that probably one of the areas in which the past five years have been less productive is that of regulating legal immigration. I appreciate that, with regard to this question, we are still a long way from creating the conditions needed to approve joint legislation. Let us be under no illusions, however; over the next five years priority must be given to common regulation and a common legal immigration policy for the countries of the European Union."@en1
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