Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-12-01-Speech-3-161"
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"en.20041201.15.3-161"2
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"Mr President, on 25 October, the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs voted on the report by Mr Coelho. It was already apparent that biometric details would soon be included in passports, and Mr Coelho tried to subject this to a number of conditions in order to safeguard the privacy of citizens in any case, for which credit is due to him.
Even before the Commission had a chance to vote on this, however, the Council tabled its own, much more far-reaching proposal. In other words, the Council did not even have the decency to wait for Parliament’s recommendation. Judging from the subsequent course of events, it would appear that the Council wants to push its own opinion through at all costs, and is prepared to bring considerable pressure to bear on Parliament in order to achieve its goal. That is a very undemocratic attitude, certainly in view of the fact that passports directly affect every EU citizen.
I do not harbour any illusions, though. I am convinced that the governments that are represented in that self-same Council will, in the national debates about this issue, point the finger at Europe once criticism gets underway; that, they will say, is what Europe prescribes. I do want to clarify, though, that this is not a European decision. It is a decision that the national governments enforce at European level, by capitalising on, or taking advantage of – whichever way you look at it – the democratic loophole that is still there.
I was very curious to hear the response by the minister responsible, but none was forthcoming. Let us hope that his response would have been less cynical than that of Mr Donner, the Dutch Justice Minister, in the Dutch Lower Chamber, to critical questions about this sequence of events. It was suggested to him that this was immoral, but, to his mind, it was simply politics."@en1
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