Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-12-12-Speech-1-117"
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"en.20051212.16.1-117"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, let me say at the very outset that this matter was the subject of a report, as long ago as May 2004, by the Committee on Petitions, in which grave violations of human rights and infringements of Community law were illustrated by reference to actual cases.
In June of this year, a delegation from this House went on an information-gathering trip to Valencia, where they interviewed various parties, members of the public, and residents in the region, as well as representatives of the regional governments and of the constitutional court.
We must bear in mind the fact that current land law in Spain accords landowners 90% of the building rights and that it is a peculiar characteristic of the law under consideration – the law on the expropriation of land – that it compels owners to hand over 10% of their land, without compensation, to any local body with a plan to develop it. We must also be aware that many owners have sustained real detriment as a result of these development processes, and that some planned developments have had devastating effects on the environment and the ecological balance of many coastal areas and especially on the future prospects for water supply, which is something else about which the European Union is concerned.
I am, then, very glad to learn that the Region of Valencia has revised this law and has already produced a new one to replace it. We must take care to ensure that the law includes, above all, an unambiguous definition of what is meant by ‘public interest’, in order to obviate, beyond all doubt, the overwhelming likelihood of the ‘public interest’ defence for expropriations being deployed to benefit private rather than public interests.
There must also be binding criteria for the calculation of compensation for expropriations, and these must be founded upon standards and principles recognised in the case law of the ECJ and the European Court of Human Rights. This is, however, a special case, and this House must be careful not to raise the public’s hopes too high, since they may, in the event, prove impossible to fulfil."@en1
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