Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-09-07-Speech-3-010"
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"en.20050907.2.3-010"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, listening to the speeches by Mr Clarke and Commissioner Frattini gives one the impression of having been transported ten years back into the past. Ten years ago, in this House, we were having the same debates. Mr Clarke is of course right; it is of course the case that the European public regards the European Union as very definitely competent to address such issues as the combating of criminal activity, terrorism and the trade in people and drugs. Every Eurobarometer survey shows what the public think the EU ought to be doing, and high up the list are the effective combating of criminal activity, protection against the threats presented by terrorism and by trafficking in human beings. Mr Clarke says, and he is right to do so, that we need to work together more, and I will quote him verbatim: ‘in our globalised world, no single nation can tackle these problems alone’. How very true that is; it is for that reason that we need more cooperation, which must be founded on mutual trust.
Listening to Commissioner Frattini, though, we learn that it is this same mutual trust that is absent, and that, if the Member States work together, their 25 different legal systems mean that they do not trust one another, for one country will store data for five years and another will get rid of it at once. What remains unchanged over ten years is that the EU Commissioner responsible for these matters declares that the European institutions need more powers and responsibilities, while all the governments, including your own, say that everything is just fine as it is, in the third pillar. Until such time as we resolve this contradiction, we can hold as many debates in this House as we like, but we will not achieve a greater degree of efficiency. That is what we in this House must spell out to both the Council and the Commission. You, in both of these institutions, must get a move on!
Time is pressing upon us. Having delivered what you, Mr Clarke, rightly described as a wake-up call in the referenda, the public want us to combat terrorism and crime in an efficient manner. There are things that they want us to take seriously. One is the idea that there is a European identity, the result of which might well be common and effective European policies. In Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal and Finland, nobody saw the London bombings as merely attacks on London; they felt them as attacks on all of us, on every single citizen of Europe. What is apparent, then, to me from what is going on politically is that there is a system of values that matters to all the people of Europe and that they want to join together in defending. What that means, then, is that a values-oriented basis for this European Union of ours has been in place for some time, and so the EU can certainly be entrusted with the defence of these values.
That is an important point, and in two respects: on the one hand – and this is where I am 100% behind Mr Clarke – that we must not be squeamish. I realise that that is a rather sloppy use of language. Those, be they terrorists or criminals, who threaten our values, have no inhibitions; they have no respect for fundamental civil liberties. It follows that we have to answer them in the same clear terms: on those who resort to violence, terror and criminal acts the hand of the forces of security and public order must come down hard. There is no other way.
Another measure of a democracy’s strength, though, is that it is able, at the same time, to show itself tough and also to guarantee its upright and law-abiding citizens their fundamental civil rights. You mentioned the principle of proportionality, and that is the solution to this problem; rigour on the one hand, and guaranteed fundamental civil rights on the other. It is a solution we must achieve, but we will manage that only if EU institutions on the one hand and national institutions on the other trust each other and cooperate with one another.
The last thing I have to say has to do with the question of how we deal with fundamentalists. No matter what sort of fundamentalism we are talking about, there is no room for it in Europe’s civil society. What has to be said about Islamic fundamentalism is that no Christian society will succeed in isolating Islamic fundamentalists; that is the particular task of moderate Islamic societies that tend towards democracy, and one particular place where such a society is to be found is Turkey. It is in Turkey that an Islamic government is engaged in establishing our western values on firm foundations; it was at that government that the attacks in Istanbul – to which Mr Poettering referred – were aimed. We should not, then deny access to the road to Europe to governments like that – Turkey’s in particular – or to a society like that, for if it turns out to be possible for our values to put down roots in an Islamic society, it demolishes the Islamists’ thesis that such a thing is impossible. That, too, is part of the active war on terrorism."@en1
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