Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-02-21-Speech-1-130"
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"en.20050221.15.1-130"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I am called upon to explain my report on the proposal for a Council decision on the exchange of information extracted from the criminal record. This proposal – as Mr Frattini has rightly stated – constitutes just a first step, which needs to be taken urgently.
The aim of this proposal for a decision will obviously be supported by everybody; the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe – to which I have the honour of belonging – certainly supports it fully, as does the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, which gave the Council proposal in question its almost unanimous approval.
The aim is to improve the quality of justice in Italy, in Europe and in all the Member States. The tangible measure put forward in the proposal for a decision is to share the information contained in criminal records. In fact, such sharing was already provided for in the 1959 Convention. Technically, however, it is difficult to make such an exchange of information work and to keep it up to date, since at present, under the 1959 Convention, information is only networked once a year and requests are made without a pre-established time limit. The Council proposal thus has the benefit of making information available more promptly, until, of course, the computerised system that the Commissioner mentioned can provide the information even more quickly, virtually on line.
I should like to clear up a misunderstanding on the part of those who see a problem in the relationship between data checking and privacy. Criminal record data are for criminals as medical records are for the sick: they are factual data. The problem is who uses such data and how they use them. To that end we ask that the data should only be used by judicial authorities and with other judicial authorities, and only in relation to unappealable convictions. That is why the Council was right to include the concepts of ‘criminal record’ and ‘unappealable conviction’ among the terms to be defined prior to such decisions.
I therefore agree with this work in progress, which is to be put into effect while we await the decisions that will be coming in the White Paper, just as I also agree with the principles that you have just enumerated, Commissioner. You said that these decisions and, more generally, the recommendations that Parliament is preparing to make should depend on two principles, which I believe we can all subscribe to and which I certainly subscribe to, as you do. The first is that the decisions of the courts should be enforced quickly. The second principle – as you said – is that there should be mutual recognition of and mutual trust in the decisions made by courts in each individual country. Thirdly, you said that any evaluation of the quality of the work done by the courts must not affect the independence of the judiciary.
I fully agree with that view, Commissioner, and I would therefore ask you to have the Commission move on to more concrete measures relating to such issues. In particular, as well as listening, I would ask you to state what you will do if a Member State shows that it has no confidence in the courts so that, for instance, there is a Member State which has not yet implemented the European arrest warrant.
We therefore explicitly request that, when similar topics are debated, the Commission should put pressure on Member States that have not yet implemented them, otherwise it might be thought that those Member States have no confidence in the decisions of other courts and other Member States and that they do not intend to implement the courts’ decisions straight away at all.
Similarly, we believe you are right to say that the independence of the judiciary must be respected, but we would also like to know what the Commission proposes to do when even members of the government in a particular Member State do not respect the judiciary and go so far as to make a mockery of it in the courts themselves. I believe, then, that the Commission also has the duty to issue directives and recommendations, so that the efforts we are making to improve the quality of justice in Europe and in the Member States are not derailed by a particular Member State for its own very special reasons."@en1
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