Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-06-17-Speech-2-018"
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"en.20080617.4.2-018"2
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"Mr President, I would like to start by expressing thanks to the rapporteur on this issue for the integrity and openness with which he has approached the questions. I should also like to thank our colleagues, where we have tried our best to find a common approach, recognising the need to treat people as individuals in the process of return and the need for due process and clarity in the law.
Discussions with the Council have shown clearly the shortfalls existing in some Member States for their own citizens at present, especially in relation to legal aid – crucial if people are to have access to the law and some defence against those who have the power – and also where effective systems are not in place to adequately represent lone children and young people in their own right. This has created certain problems in the discussions with the Council.
I regret that, after such long negotiations, my group cannot accept the negotiated position because, while we do not object in theory to such a directive, it certainly does not meet the standards that we set at the beginning. Why not? Because for us it entrenches many of the problems we have been fighting in our own Member States.
One of the issues is the length of detention. While the proposed directive puts limits on that, we know what long periods of detention do to the mental health of individuals and to children who are detained. We have seen it for ourselves, and the research is there. We have seen the conditions in which many people are kept and while the proposed directive makes clear that detention centres should not be prisons, it is not always clear to us what the difference is between those centres and prisons.
We also have questions about the entry ban, and Article 9 makes clear it should be the general rule for anybody who is returned involuntarily. So Member States signing up will have to answer questions like that of one my constituents, Serwa Nouri Yousef, who has refugee status, who is now eight months pregnant and whose husband has been forcibly returned to Iraq and is now missing. Under this directive he would also face an entry ban. So what happens to family life, despite the claims to humanitarian protection?
We also have questions surrounding Article 3(c) about where people should be returned to, and feel that, if the reference to ‘other arrangements’ includes the metaphorical handshakes that we have seen in the past between Mr Berlusconi and Gadafi, this is unacceptable as such accords are made outside of written public agreements."@en1
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