Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-06-13-Speech-2-298"

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"en.20060613.28.2-298"2
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"The criminal law of this ambitious Europe is still very much in its infancy. Loose consensuses and tentative progress show the Member States’ resistance to the future and the disgraceful contradiction of a Community policy that is on the one hand based on shared fundamental values but on the other leaves the law underpinning these values to the discretion of individual Member States. It was this irony that the Constitutional Treaty attempted to remove and that the Court interpreted as favourably as it could. Europe’s institutions have said that European criminal law is based on the simple principle of mutual recognition. Unless this view is reversed, Europe will never have criminal law or an area of freedom, security and justice in the truest sense, because Europe is a global justice project rather than a project based on preferential areas of justice. Yet what is emerging is that Europe lacks a common area with a shared project in the field of criminal law. It is, rather, a fragmented mosaic of borders; harmonisation has been piecemeal and low-level; there is no political or criminal-law programme to be followed; there has been harmonisation of the minimum level of maximum sentences. All of which illustrates our lack of courage. Harmonisation is only apparent in sentencing, and does not cover the causes of crime, alternative sentencing or methodologies. In a Europe that stands for the dignity of all citizens, for the values that underpin that dignity, for the rule of law, for proportionality and for equality, what is required is a criminal justice programme. Yet in terms of the way in which powers are distributed, what we have is criminal law that is absurdly removed from the values that it guarantees; it is criminal law that follows a hard line in the Council insofar as it is not shared democratically among the parliaments. What this shows is mutual recognition of individual criminal justice systems without any essential base of harmonisation. This is utterly iniquitous. We do not want this, but it is happening in Europe, because criminal law is the highest expression of values. We await the broader scope of the Treaty and more importantly, the strong political will that is taking a long time to materialise."@en1

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