Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-06-13-Speech-2-296"
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"en.20060613.28.2-296"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I must begin by apologising for the absence of Mr Gargani, who is unable to be present by reason of illness. Members of my own Group have asked me to stand in for him today as rapporteur and to say something about the content of this report.
I will start by observing that this ruling by the Court of Justice came as no surprise – at any rate, not to me. There may well have been many who thought that things would not turn out this way, but I actually see this as no more than a logical conclusion, since we have for some time in the past seen the Commission adopt varying – sometimes widely divergent – approaches to legislative proposals relating to criminal law.
Drawing on my practical experience in the field of business law, I just want to point out that many past directives proposed on the basis of legal bases in the first pillar – for example, those on money-laundering and market abuse, or the provisions on insider trading – have included at least elements of criminal law.
It is in fact perfectly right and proper that the Court of Justice should, very often in the past, and even when the facts of the case were different, have worked on the principle that the issue of which legal basis should be decisive should be decided by reference to the objective of the proposal as a whole. It was therefore perfectly obvious that the Court of Justice should, in this case, decide on the basis of a specific example from environmental law that, here too, it is not possible to take legal acts that in fact belong together and split them up in such a way that certain aspects are taken to refer to a part of the Treaties other than the actual objective that was originally in mind, where this falls under the first pillar. The result, then, comes as no surprise to me.
What, though, are the consequences now? In the first place, it does nothing to change the fact that criminal law is treated primarily as a matter for the Member States, for the national level, where Europe has powers only under exceptional circumstances.
This being so, I too take the view that the European legislator – who may be able to make use of this instrument, but is not required to use it in a coercive manner – is well-advised, as a matter of principle, to refrain from legislation in matters of criminal law. In every specific situation, decisions must be reached on a case-by-case basis, on the basis of whether or not criminal law provisions are needed in order to achieve this objective, or whether it ought to be left to the Member States to decide these matters and regulate them. Caution, then, needs to be the order of the day for the legislator, whether that be Parliament or the Council, and that above all, I believe – and this is why the Treaties, from the outset, leave criminal law in the hands of the Member States – quite simply because the systems of criminal law in Europe are so very, very different, not only in terms of deciding what is a crime, but also in terms of how that crime should be punished. There are Member States in which the sentence is enforced in full; there are others in which, as a rule, only 50% is paid; others in which it is two-thirds; still others in which the courts order additional penalties of a punitive nature, which, in turn, do not exist in that form in other Member States. I do believe, then, that if Europe starts, where it is not necessary to do so, to lay down standard penalties for all manner of things, then the consequence of that will be unsystematic interventions in the criminal law systems of the Member States, and, since the usefulness of that is a matter of doubt, it is for that reason above all others that we should exercise a degree of self-restraint.
I see the report that Mr Gargani has produced, and which has been adopted by the Committee, as putting that into effect, and see that as its essential substance.
We are of course in favour of the idea that the Commission should now attempt to analyse, one by one, the proposals that need to be revised on the grounds that their division into two different legal acts no longer corresponds to the law as laid down by the Court of Justice, and should then come up with proposals as to how adjustments can be made.
As for the amendments submitted in response to the Committee on Legal Affairs’ resolution, I am able to say, on behalf of my group, that some of these – particularly those tabled by the Socialist Group in the European Parliament and the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe – are acceptable, while others are not. Please do not expect me to go into details, for I have agreed this with the rapporteur, but I can say in general terms that there were no fundamental differences within the Committee on Legal Affairs when it came to evaluating these issues. The problems lie more in the nuances, perhaps in the issue of how far one should actually go in individual cases, but otherwise, the committee was in general agreement on this. I thank the House most warmly for its attention."@en1
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