Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-02-12-Speech-1-158"
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"en.20070212.16.1-158"2
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".
Mr President, I am going to start by speaking in French, as the Commissioner has not yet had time to put on his headphones for the interpretation.
There are supposed to be exceptions for medicines, but nobody knows how the exceptions for medicines should be applied. Furthermore, amongst other things, nothing is said about medicines that do not require a prescription.
Your press release says that water is prohibited because it is very difficult to distinguish it from other liquids. Are there any bombs that can be drunk, Commissioner? We do not know.
You have created an entirely arbitrary system, which in some cases verges on the absurd, in the face of which the citizens have no mechanism for defending themselves against the absolute power of the uniformed private agent in front of them. With no defence, in the literal sense, the passengers have no rights. They must keep quiet and obey or cancel their journey.
Commissioner, the citizens have an almost blind faith in the notion that what the authorities do — and you are an authority, as are we — is for their own good and security, but we Members have the obligation — not just the right, but the obligation — to ensure that fear of terrorism is not used as a pretext for restrictions of freedom, which may be pointless unless they are well-founded.
This Parliament has not delegated powers to the European Commission to legislate in secret and impose obligations on the citizens, without any kind of jurisdictional control of their application. And it does not even have that power within the context of comitology. I would therefore ask the Commissioner, as other groups are also asking you, what impact analysis has the Commission carried out? What powers does it believe it has, within the framework of comitology, to carry out what it has applied here? What is the theoretical basis and what is the true basis, backed up by studies and reports? What other security models has the Commission employed?
Commissioner, rather than promoting it, these measures seriously harm the image of security and the image of the European Union as a whole.
On 4 October 2006, the European Commission adopted a regulation amending the rules governing airport security. It was certainly guided by the best of intentions. However, it acted in secret, Commissioner, by including in these rules an annex that was declared secret, and therefore hidden from the citizens for whom it is intended, and whose lives it directly affects.
This text, with its measures and their considerable impact on the entire European Union, was drafted in just one week. It therefore took the European Commission just one week to decide on everything that needed to be done. In the space of a week, the European Commission made a law compulsory for millions of people, on the basis of a secret meeting of the Aviation Safety Committee, held on 27 September 2006. The only information given to the citizens on this subject was given via a press note. The citizens learnt of the regulation directly, and exclusively, through a press note published by the Commission. And even the press note says in point 7: ‘and recognises that this measure is based on the US experience’.
Now that you can hear the interpreter, I shall switch to Spanish.
This regulation lays down exceptions, the Commission has told the press. Since the regulation is secret, however, no citizen can apply these exceptions should they need to and should they be faced with someone abusing their authority.
In other words, the European Commission has created legislation that imposes obligations on the citizens, which restricts their rights, but which, as a result of its secret nature, cannot be applied by any court anywhere in the European Union. Commissioner, press releases and information leaflets do not yet carry any weight in the courts.
At the same time, the way in which these rules have been approved means that their application has been left to the Member States, which are applying them in an utterly chaotic way throughout the Union, and by a chaotic way I mean, in practice, an arbitrary way.
Each airport acts as it sees fit. In some places, a liquid cheese is seen as a threat to our security, in others it is not. In some places, a cake filled with cream is seen as a threat to security, in others it is not. What is a threat on the flight from Madrid to Barcelona is not a threat on the flight from Barcelona to Madrid. What is a threat in Zurich – because they also apply your rules – or in Heathrow, or in Charles de Gaulle, is not a threat in Milan-Malpensa airport.
There are supposed to be exceptions to this rule, Commissioner, for passengers in transit for example — you also announced this is in the infamous press release, in paragraph 16 — but in practice, nobody knows how to apply these exceptions to passengers in transit."@en1
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