Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-05-19-Speech-1-218"
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"en.20080519.27.1-218"2
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"Mr President, I understood I have only two minutes, but I wish this talk could be much longer. I very much hope that I will continue with all of you, whenever you have time and interest, to discuss together consumer issues. I would be more than delighted, because I receive a lot of incentives – even in this late session.
I would like to make my political commitment, that I will continue to tackle the issues with sustainable development, working on CEE and GPSD (the General Product Safety Directive) and they how could they be complementary to each other. Of course I will continue with the digital guide, which was one of the very first talks which I had with Ms Roithová. I am, of course, working together with my fellow commissioners; this portfolio is becoming more and more wide-ranging and evolving other portfolios, but I believe that this is part of the beauty of this portfolio.
So, there are many things. Let me agree with all of you in saying that if we would like to have a complete internal market, we need to stress the rights of consumers. This is really the only way to fulfil and to square the second phase of the internal market. I believe that if we are making good progress with our scoreboard, this scoreboard will be part of the internal market’s bigger picture, and then we will have already quite a full understanding of how the European internal market is going on.
I was specially touched by Mrs Dahl – I am sorry that she is no longer in the plenary – who said that this was the first time that she had taken the floor. But, referring to the so-called race to the bottom, if we have common rules everywhere in the European Union and not just protecting, in the best way, the national consumer, I think that we should not pick the winners, except one: if the winner is the consumer.
We started, years ago, making a good environment for business, and this was the right thing. But if you want to develop European business, business needs consumers, and we cannot deny that consumers need the same tackling of bottlenecks, so that they can feel comfortable everywhere, as a Swede living in Brussels, for example – we need to have the same rights, we need to have the same rights when we are shopping and enjoying e-commerce and other distance selling.
Let me focus for a while on collective redress. I carefully listened to all of you. Let me mention that, in our 10 benchmarks, which we distributed, discussed and received more than 300 opinions about, half of these collective redress benchmarks were related not to having punitive damages compensated and not to being an expensive procedure. So at least five of these benchmarks are related and address the issue of not having additional costs.
I believe that the best thing is to open our minds and not to make dogma, and this is my plea for support in this aspect. So I would also like to tell you that what we are preparing is communication: this is why we do not have a study on economic, social and environmental impact, as is done for all our legislative proposals. But we are doing something much more in preparation, and this is to have two really very thorough studies, comparative studies.
Let me invite you: before the end of the month we will have three big stakeholders’ conferences: with businesses, with consumers and with academics, and our services will provide four places in the workshops for European Parliament representatives. All the outcomes of these three events will be absolutely public, put on our websites and communicated in the best manner, and of course I am around and always open to continue to discuss your hopes and your fears.
I would like to end by thanking you and saying that maybe for the first time, almost nobody mentioned that Europe is going to do a class action. I believe that this is a positive sign."@en1
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