Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-04-23-Speech-1-135"
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"en.20070423.18.1-135"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, it is true that the mass importation of counterfeit products does a great deal of damage to the European economy, particularly to the production of quality goods, and I am indeed in favour of doing something to address this. What is needed most of all is that it should be made possible for the big criminal organisations to which reference was made earlier to be better punished or brought to justice by means of European law. On that much we all agree; it is on how this is to be accomplished that we have our differences.
I would like to extend warm thanks to Mr Zingaretti for having worked very hard to bring about agreement, but we all need to bring particular precision to bear on this question, not least because we are standing, legally speaking, on really thin ice. Further progress on this point was achieved by drawing on an environmental protection provision in criminal law, but that means that we bear a responsibility for approaching the matter with particular care and precision. The idea behind European law is that through it we should deal with matters that the Member States cannot accomplish on their own, particularly in relation to criminal law, which means in this case the handling of the big criminal organisations. For that we need a precise definition of what the scope of this regulation is.
If we leave it open – which is what some of us want – or if we include the consumers in it, we will end up taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut without being able to have any real impact on the big organisations that are doing European businesses so much serious damage, for the fact is that, in the absence of any precise definition, small-time entrepreneurs – who often do not know whose goods they are selling or from whence those goods come – can end up being clobbered by criminal sanctions.
It will be young people who are most affected by this. Most young people in Europe cannot tell the difference between what may be downloaded from the Internet and what may not, and we certainly do not want to criminalise the end users. We want to concentrate on those things that European law is meant to address, with everything else being left to national law.
To Mr Manders, who wants to raise consumers’ awareness, I should like to say that, if you get your hands on a Gucci bag for ten euros, any consumer might realise what is going on, but that does not apply in the case of many other products. I do not want European law to be over-zealously applied where it does not make sense to apply it at all; particularly in the commercial sphere, the areas of application must …"@en1
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