Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-05-18-Speech-2-456"
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"en.20100518.33.2-456"2
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"Madam President, everybody is talking about the Stockholm Programme. That is a Christmas tree with several hundred wishes. I would like everybody to speak about the reality. How were these Christmas tree wishes treated before the Lisbon Treaty? Behind closed doors, without much consideration for the citizens and what they want, wish for and expect; in the third pillar, where ministers of the interior were asking neither the European Parliament nor the Commission, and where the European Court of Justice had no possibility to intervene.
An action plan, well, the colleague is not there any more, but an action plan for combating the violence against women. In 2011, a comprehensive text about protecting the victims, all kinds of victims – for me there is not a victim here, a victim there and a third category of victims – all kinds of victims have to be considered.
Yes, we have been working on data protection; when fortunately you, Parliament, said no to the way things have been working before Lisbon was implemented. We will not continue like this any more and, yes, Chairman of the committee, you know that your committee and the other committees are fully integrated in the way we are preceding.
We will have many things to do together: very technical questions, which will have a very important impact on our society. We will have to do something; we will have to explain to the citizens what we are doing. Because that is also a part of the whole thing and it is not the easiest part of the whole issue.
Yes, we have to take measures, for instance, on illegal immigration and asylum and, as you have seen, my colleague, Cecilia Malmström, has very concrete proposals on illegal immigration, on border controls, on legal migration. Yes, it would be important if the Parliament could, together with the Council, adopt the existing proposals, the asylum package, the simple permit proposal, the joint resettlement programme, the mutual recognition and the just adopted action plan for unaccompanied minors. There is an awful lot in the pipeline.
It is not about who is going to do what because certain things you simply cannot do. Here is an example: you asked for the Anti-Discrimination Directive. The Anti-Discrimination Directive, I am sorry to say, is a question that has to be solved by unanimity and it is blocked in the Council. So what do you want me to do – not me, because it was before my time – the Commission has put anti-discrimination on the table, unanimity is blocked in the Council? So speak to the Council; speak with those who are blocking it.
Same-sex couples: well you know perfectly well that it is the prerogative of subsidiarity, the competence of Member States to regulate the way they treat same-sex couples. Where the European Union comes in is the cross-border treatment of these same-sex couples. But I cannot do the work for France, for Italy, for Poland, for Romania, for Greece and for Luxembourg; that has to be done by those Member States alone. I can see there is no discrimination if those people, from wherever they come, are exercising their rights to cross-border mobility, and that is what we are going to do.
We have started already to see that, in terms of mobility, in terms of citizens rights, in terms of collaboration between the legal systems, in terms of eliminating the borders that still exist in this single market, which, sorry to say, is not a single market when it comes to citizens. That is why I am very happy; I have read the report by Mario Monti. There are many elements in this report, which say where we have to move. You know what is my bible? The report, which was drawn up by one of your Members, contains all the elements on the free movement of citizens and all the problems that have to be solved.
Now what I propose to you is to take them, one by one, and solve them, one by one, in full cooperation with you. When I put on the table a proposal, and you have seen how it goes, you will have so many proposals that you will have to work at night – I do not know if it is permitted under employment rules and human rights, but I will not care for your human rights as Members of Parliament. We will work until we have solved these problems – there are hundreds of problems to be solved and I cannot do it alone. I need your very constructive help. I know I will get this help but help me to work on one element after the other, even if it has to be one element per week. It is going to be on your table. I am willing to come to your committees as often as you call me, Madam President, and we will discuss this over, element by element. In five years’ time, with your help, we will have changed this continent.
That is where we are starting from: an impossible situation. Where
decisions were not even carried out at national level, where citizens did not have the means or the instruments to go to court, to protest and to seek justice.
Fortunately, we now have the Lisbon Treaty. There is no third pillar any more. There are Commission proposals, codecision, implementation at Member State level, control by the European Court of Justice, but that means also that things cannot be done instantly any more. Rules and proposals have to follow the normal way, under which you parliamentarians have asked the Commission to conduct its work.
First, a thorough analysis of what is feasible, what is good, what has added value. Second, public consultation, in order to know whether the ideas that we put on the table will be accepted or not by civil society, by industry, by the Member States, by the national parliaments, which are now a player in all these questions and which conduct the subsidiarity test. And then, impact assessments, in order to see if what we are doing is the right way. And, only then, we have the definite proposal from the Commission.
If you want the Commission to continue to do as has been done over the last number of years, just tell me, and I will come with a proposal every week. And do you know what will happen with those proposals? They will first be blocked in the national parliaments, and rightly so, because we have to come with serious proposals based on the legal assumptions that what we are doing is strong, is feasible and can be implemented in the Member States.
I do not want the first proposal we make to be challenged before the Court of Justice and before the Court of Human Rights. I would like to lead all of us to the way where the citizens will understand that the added value of what we are doing here is of real benefit to them in practical terms. Yes, as the Commissioner responsible for women’s affairs, I have heard this Parliament discussing what we need to do, most of all in order to give legal certainty to women in all our Member States, that when they have a problem of violence, they will get justice and not the illusion that they hope they will get justice and then they get nowhere and end up with nothing. So here we really have to work together.
There are hundreds of measures which have to be ‘Lisbonised’, which have to be taken out of the hole and brought into the light of day, which have to be adapted to the real rules of law – hundreds of measures that do not work.
The arrest warrant: Ms Ludford was just speaking about this. Of course it is not carried out in the Member States because the construction around the mutual recognition and the mutual trust, which is at the basis of the mutual recognition, has not been built up. Colleagues, you cannot do all this without having mutual trust. I am sorry, I cannot by decree insert mutual trust in the heads of the judges all over Europe!
We have to build this mutual trust with the legislation and with the measures to boost the rights of citizens in all our Member States, so that the judges also implement the rules we have been looking for and, yes, we are advancing very quickly on this."@en1
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