Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-02-21-Speech-1-153"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20050221.15.1-153"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:translated text |
".
Mr President, I am grateful to the rapporteurs and the Members who have spoken, even for calling on the Commission to act and to act quickly. I shall try to give not exhaustive answers – clearly I will not have time for that – but some information that may be useful to Parliament.
By the end of April, the Commission will present a communication on mutual recognition and the development of the principle of mutual trust. This communication will include and touch on most of the issues covered by the two reports that we are examining today, and will deal with the evaluation of justice, training for judges and the harmonisation of a number of procedural rules. In that respect, I would also add that by the end of the year we will be putting out a Green Paper on the presumption of innocence: many Members of this Parliament have highlighted the need to reconcile the right to safety, and hence the right to have crime brought under control, with legal guarantees for the accused.
In early 2006 we will be publishing a second Green Paper dealing with the gathering of evidence, which will certainly be followed by more complete initiatives on the implementation of alternative sentences as well as an interesting – and, I hope, extremely useful – initiative: a framework decision, which we expect to draw up during 2005, on alternative control measures to temporary custody. You are aware that the subject of temporary custody, or detention prior to conviction, is one in which people’s rights to freedom have to be weighed against the state’s right to prosecute criminals. These, then, are just a few examples of initiatives – but ones I believe to be important – which the Commission will be putting forward over the coming months.
Ladies and gentlemen, I will be happy if the Member States in the Council are as bold as you have been today regarding the exchange of information on criminal records. The Commission would certainly like to move faster on the computerised information exchange system. We started a debate last month at the Luxembourg Council of Ministers and we intend to continue it. There are technical problems, however, as well as the political ones which someone pointed out. We still lack that degree of mutual trust that we need to allow data on past convictions to be entered into an electronic search engine, which in technical terms could be set up very quickly. As Mr Di Pietro rightly said, it is not a question of new data but of data on convictions, which can be used by judges. We will therefore be very careful to prevent any use of such data that falls outside the rationale given by the judicial authority – which we obviously have to trust – when it asks to see the information.
To conclude, I believe that this subject needs a more united Europe. It needs a more united Europe because we have to harmonise our criminal justice systems, which are unfortunately highly diverse, and we have to be sure of the legal positions when – and let us emphasise this – we respect the independence of the judiciary. Perhaps we should worry about harmonising the rules: the rules about what a criminal association is and how and why the head of a criminal organisation can be punished vary too much from one country to another. That, then, is what we should worry about: harmonising the criminal law systems a little more. That is a job that we will do wholeheartedly. In the end, we will carefully monitor how well the Member States adhere to these principles.
In three days’ time, I will be presenting the Commission communication on the European arrest warrant to the Council meeting of Justice Ministers, and I will take the opportunity to say quite clearly that unfortunately – and much to my regret – Italy is the only country in Europe that has not yet adopted the necessary national legislation, and that there are also a few countries that have adopted national legislation but, as one of you pointed out, have tried to reintroduce filters that are not in keeping with the European spirit. The arrest warrant legislation serves to speed up the implementation of certain procedures; if we want to speed it up in the case of terrorism and organised crime, all Member States must have confidence in the system, and we will keep a watchful eye open to ensure that Europe’s rules are fully observed."@en1
|
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples