Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-06-22-Speech-3-145"
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"en.20050622.17.3-145"2
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".
Mr President, it has been a pleasure to draft this report for two reasons. The first of these is the excellent cooperation on the part of both the committees that have delivered opinions, namely the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy and the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, and on the part of the vast majority of political groups, in particular the Socialist Group in the European Parliament, the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats, the Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance and the Union for Europe of the Nations Group. The second reason is that the Commission has made an extremely valuable contribution on points of substance.
The report also encourages the Commission to support research in the field of social sciences, without which appropriate planning of research into modern technologies is inconceivable. I have to say, and it gives me great satisfaction to do so, that this would appear to be the key contribution made by Parliament to the Commission’s proposal, namely that any discussion of advanced technological research must first focus on support for such research.
Given that defence-related issues are at the top of the political agenda, there is every likelihood that this Programme will enable us to increase security and make it easier to achieve the EU’s objectives. Mr President, I would therefore strongly recommend that the House vote in favour of this report.
The European Security Strategy states that there are currently a great many new threats and challenges to our security, the most significant of which include the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the spread of international terrorism. It is a fact of life that the kind of terrorism to which Europe grew accustomed in the 1960s and 1970s has been replaced by a new kind of terrorism that affects many more people and is far more deadly and dangerous.
What this means is that the objectives of maintaining public security and making our security and defence policy credible are hard to achieve nowadays without high-tech tools.
The European Union currently invests four times less in the defence sector and five times less in research and development than the United States. The result of this is that EU Member States are not in a position to close the technology gap that exists between the United States and Europe in terms of defence potential and security.
Accordingly, in response to this need for more effective security research, the Commission has proposed a European Security Research Programme, due to be launched in two years’ time under the umbrella of the Seventh Framework Programme. The European Security Research Programme will be based on a coherent, flexible and coordinated approach, and will focus on research projects that enhance our technological capabilities.
The approach currently taken to security research at the highest EU level lacks coherence. This leads to extensive fragmentation and weak cooperation between Member States, and also makes such research less cost-effective.
The establishment of a European Security Research Programme will therefore facilitate both interoperability and cost optimisation by putting in place common frameworks and structures at European level. The Programme provides for the exploitation of synergies between defence and civil research, so it can be expected to boost the integration of these two sectors. What is more, Parliament’s adoption of the Programme, the proposed annual budget for which is EUR 1 billion in addition to any research funding already earmarked for this sector by the individual Member States, should serve to narrow the gap that currently exists between the EU Member States and the United States.
Strengthening our research base and finding more innovative solutions is bound to enhance Europe’s competitiveness. It is anticipated that this Programme will be an excellent opportunity for European industry, and also for our research centres. I have in mind all such centres, academic, non-academic, civil and defence ones. The Programme will undoubtedly improve external border protection and make it possible to modernise the armed forces of the EU Member States.
The report refers to several priority areas of interest, of which I shall only mention a few. They include the fields of C4ISR systems, or in other words command, control, communications, computing, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and also research in the field of biotechnology and space and IT technology."@en1
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