Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-02-21-Speech-1-152"
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"en.20050221.15.1-152"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, the issue of the quality of criminal justice and the harmonisation of criminal legislation is a core theme in the EU’s global justice project. Criminal justice is the most hotly debated area of human rights – its reciprocal nature, its conflicts and the fact that it is based on a principle of essential dignity. The criminal justice issue therefore goes to the moral core of European political culture. It is therefore of pressing importance that we pursue an active policy aimed at enhancing the quality of criminal justice and at harmonising Member State legislation.
The emergence of a European Constitution, which incorporates a binding Charter of Fundamental Rights and constitutes a system of values characterised by unity and integration, demands higher quality justice and the harmonisation of criminal legislation. Criminal law is in fact material constitutional law and synthesises all fundamental constitutional values. The absence of harmonisation in this area will imply non-compliance with the principle of equality among citizens, and, by extension, non-compliance with the Constitution. The harmonisation of the criminal justice system must not therefore be done half-heartedly, nor must it be merely the basis for mutual recognition of judicial decisions; it should be an end in itself. A concerted policy, by virtue of the very fact that it is a concerted policy, does not jeopardise the Member States’ decision-making powers in this area.
The European Constitution’s system of values also implies that the harmonisation of legislation must cut across the entire criminal justice system. It should not solely consider the main strands of the process and the serving of sentences, but should be extended to cover the substantive rules, the politics of defining offences and to the criteria for setting sentences. Security should not be the sole concern; we should also be concerned with humanising criminal justice.
If Europe does not embrace this scheme, its Constitution’s justice system will be, to quote Kafka’s satirical metaphor, a system of open doors through which nobody can enter."@en1
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