Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-10-25-Speech-2-298"
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"en.20051025.23.2-298"2
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". – Mr President, I thank the Commissioner for his very positive and helpful speech. I believe I can speak for the Committee on Citizens’ Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs in saying that we support him in what he is doing. We want to press on a bit harder, but we all want to fight organised crime as effectively and as quickly as we possibly can. We therefore support you, Commissioner, in what you propose and we will continue to push you hard to keep up the progress, if we can.
I speak for the committee as rapporteur, not for myself. We recommend full support for the Commission proposal but, as the Commissioner has said, there are little extras that we have suggested adding. We want to strengthen Europol but we want to make it an EU agency. I hope that colleagues can support Amendment 45 by the Socialist Group which refers to there being no more strengthening until it is a proper EU agency. Then we can give it flat-out support. We want to confiscate the profits of organised crime.
There is one point that the Commissioner has not mentioned: because organised crime crosses frontiers but law enforcement is up to the individual Member States and cannot cross frontiers, the committee wants to point out – and we voted for this – that there is a pressing need to create a European Union police force. We are not saying ‘create it’, but that there is a pressing need. We have to think about that, however politically controversial it may be.
I thank the Commissioner for talking about a centralised agency within each Member State. We need that to coordinate the often-fragmented efforts within individual Member States. He did not mention the idea of an asset recovery bureau, modelled on the Irish system in Dublin whereby a government agency can actually confiscate the assets of suspected criminals and subsequently give them back if they are proved to be not guilty. Because criminals operate to make money, if one takes away their assets, they get very upset. That is the way to hit them hardest. We, as a committee, would like to see an asset recovery bureau set up in every one of the 25 Member States to really hit the criminals where it hurts the most.
The committee is in full support of the Commission proposal, but we want to go further and faster. I believe that Parliament and the Commission are allies on this. The real problem – and I am sorry to see that the Council benches, as usual, are empty – is the Council putting into effect and ratifying the things it says it will. For example, none of the protocols strengthening Europol in the past have been ratified by all Member States. Europol is still much weaker than it should be.
We support the Commission and we would very much like the Council to move a bit faster."@en1
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