Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-05-23-Speech-3-401"
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"en.20070523.26.3-401"2
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"Madam President, I am sorry to tell you this is going to be a tale of woe, of unhappiness and of problems for Europe, because organised crime is growing in every field, it is hidden and we do not have a full picture. It is based in states outside the EU, mostly, where government is weak and therefore there is very little action to stop the gangs and the criminals who are working in an organised way.
I am referring to drugs like heroin and cocaine, which are brought in from different parts of the world; to ecstasy, which is exported from Europe to different parts of the world; to illegal immigrants, who are brought in from Asia and Africa without proper controls; to counterfeit goods of every imaginable kind, some just simple toys or music CDs but also some things like medicines, which are deeply serious and life-threatening; and to crime on the internet – the theft of money and identity. In every area, crime is growing and in every area we each have, maybe, some small experience.
Every industry is aware of the problems in its own sector, but it keeps the statistics hidden because it does not want to damage public confidence. If a bag manufacturer says, ‘Be careful about buying my beautiful leather bag because it may be a fake from the Far East or elsewhere,’ they damage their prospects. So, nobody tells the public what is really going on.
Some organised gangs are ethnic families working very well in a tightly-knit way; some are now organised like very efficient, very big multinational corporations – this week I was even given an organisational chart for an organised criminal gang! They cross the borders inside our Union with total ease and without any difficulty at all. Here is the problem: our police cannot cross any borders. So, the criminals are going wherever they like, doing whatever they do, but our police are restricted to their own regions or their own Member States and therefore are deeply handicapped and cannot fight the criminals on equal terms. What do individual police officers do if there is a problem across the border? Do they go to a central point and get contact details from the telephone directory? There is no directory. There is no facility for a police officer in any one country to find a telephone number or an e-mail address for an appropriate contact in another Member State. It is unbelievable – a total lack of cooperation.
The reason for this is the lack of mutual trust and understanding, meaning that, traditionally, we do not want to give foreigners our information or reveal the source of our information, because that would give away too many secrets. We do not trust each other inside Europe. The gangs trust each other beautifully and so they are winning hands down.
It is not all woe. The Americans, with their open borders between states, found exactly the same problem in the 1930s. You probably saw the film
. They robbed banks, took the money across a state border and the police could not follow them. The Americans invented the FBI with powers to cross borders, and I suspect that is the stage we have now reached in Europe. We need a law enforcement agency that can pursue criminals across frontiers. The public will be very sceptical; the national leaders say nothing about it, but I think we have reached that point and we have to do something about it.
Today, however, on this side of the Atlantic, in the European Union, there are no statistics to tell the public the scale of the problem. Each of the 27 Member States collects statistics in its own different way. There are no comparative EU statistics, so we hope that the Commission is working in that direction to start that happening in a few years’ time. We have no idea, no clear picture, no information for the public, no democratic control, because this comes under the third pillar and is therefore controlled by the national governments, who do very little because they do not feel any pressure from the public to take any action.
The only way that we will get a change, I fear, is if there is a dramatic shock, something like 9/11 in Europe. Something so bad that the public says, ‘How was this allowed to happen? How did the criminal gangs get away with this for so long when there was so much inactivity in 27 national capitals?’ But, if the criminals are smart – and they are very smart – they will never come up above the horizon. They will never commit a 9/11 and they will just go on eating into our society, feeding off us, weakening us, taking away jobs and, basically, weakening the whole Union. We really need action, and I hope Parliament will support this report and push the ministers into taking some decisions."@en1
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"Bonnie and Clyde"1
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