Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-03-16-Speech-4-171"

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"Mr President, I agree with all the arguments brought by the rapporteur and the Conference of Chairmen to support the separation of health and consumer protection tasks, and I support the separation. I would like to present a further argument. Consumer protection faces very specific challenges both in the new and old Member States, which are totally independent of health issues. These challenges should be treated with the highest degree of independence. Consumer protection had initially involved goods, and in particular food and household items. However, this situation has changed radically over the past decade. On the one hand, together with market integration, consumer protection, too, must extend beyond goods to include services. On the other hand, consumer protection must adapt to the market restructuring caused by the rapid development and expansion of information technologies. Nowadays it is possible, for instance, for a French consumer sitting in a Belgian home to ask for a consumer loan from a Dutch bank by sending an SMS text message, and then, with a few mouse clicks, to purchase a Swedish electronic product from a Lithuanian Internet store, to be delivered by a British service provider. Such situations are quite usual these days, and they only reflect the normal operation of our internal market. And yet, within the current legal frameworks, it is not only difficult to guess which consumer protection regulation of which country is applicable at any given time, but even the competence of the various possible authorities is difficult to determine, especially for the consumer. For this reason, with the integration of the services market and the irreversible expansion of online purchases, the future European Consumer Protection Agency will also have, apart from the traditional task of consumer protection, other crucially important tasks in the areas of research, analysis and planning. Like industry, our legal system and institutions also need innovation. The frameworks ensuring protection for the European consumer in the 21st century must be sufficiently flexible to adapt to the immeasurable variety of potential real-life situations. In order to accomplish this work, we need independent resources, excellent and versatile specialists, and I am convinced that it is in the joint interest of the 450 million European consumers that the Consumer Protection Agency becomes an independent pole of excellence. I ask for the support of the Commissioner to achieve this."@en1

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