Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-10-26-Speech-3-321-000"
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"en.20111026.22.3-321-000"2
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"Mr President, I will start first with the oral question. As you know, with the Treaty of Lisbon the protection of the rights of the child was introduced as an objective of the European Union and this is made legally binding by the Charter of Fundamental Rights that guarantees the protection of the rights of the child. Now we must of course step up the efforts and put some action behind these beautiful words – within the limits of EU competences – with concrete actions and concrete results. That is the aim of the EU Agenda for the Rights of the Child that the Commission adopted in February this year.
A few years ago, with the financial support of Parliament, the Commission launched a pilot project aiming to introduce a child alert mechanism across Europe. This project consisted either of establishing a child alert system in those Member States or/and improving cooperation mechanisms amongst neighbouring countries. This is crucial and there are some good practices. For instance, we have the
between France, Belgium and Britain that respects national sovereignty but has laid down procedures and provides the possibility to share information. Some Member States have not yet realised the values of these systems and my colleague Vice-President Reding has called on Member States who have not yet introduced child alert mechanisms to take all necessary steps for their implementation without delay.
Child alert is not the only tool. We also have the 116000 hotline in Europe designed to report missing children and offer support to the families of missing children. Sixteen Member States have signed up to this and we are of course making every effort for the rest of them to join as well. We will continue to support and encourage Member States, within the powers of the Commission, to ensure protection and promotion of the rights of the child.
Passing now to the Angelilli report; sexual crimes committed by adults towards children is the most horrendous form of criminality. As adults, we cannot and we should not accept this, and the report today is the proof that we will not accept it. It is a delicate compromise with a lot of people involved and I would like to pay tribute to the work of Ms Angelilli and her collaborators, the shadows, the coordinators and the Polish and Hungarian Presidencies. It is a compromise, and it is true that the Commission would have liked to go further in criminalising child sex tourism by including EU habitual residents as well as nationals in the extra-territorial jurisdiction against abusing children abroad. The compromise has considerably strengthened the proposal by criminalising child grooming more extensively and adding important provisions on victim protection, providing the right for employers to ask for information on criminal records and providing for awareness-raising and training of professionals as preventive measures. This directive equips us much better than the current one from 2004.
On the prosecution of offenders there are 20 criminal offences, including new trends like grooming online, webcam abuse, web viewing child pornography; different levels of penalties from one year to ten years’ imprisonment; the elimination of hurdles that may be set by statutes of limitation or confidentiality rules and special police units specially equipped to identify child victims – which will be a very important investigative tool.
On child tourism, there is extra-territorial jurisdiction for nationals; the removal of procedural hurdles and the prohibition of organising travel or advertising opportunities to abuse children. There is extensive assistance to protect the victims with an individual assessment of each child. There will be risk assessment for convicted offenders and intervention programmes as well as education, awareness training, etc. to detect child sexual abuse.
On images of sexual abuse of children on the Internet, we have agreement on the removal of web pages hosted in Member States, intended action to have them removed abroad and the possibility of blocking, subject to transparent procedures.
Again, I would like to thank Parliament for your true commitment to this. It has been a difficult journey but I think we have skilfully navigated in this complicated file. With this we show that our collective aim is to protect children and we do not tolerate children being used as objects to satisfy the sexual needs or greed of adults. Thank you very much for your hard work in this.
The agenda pointed out something that you have raised in your questions; the significant lack of reliable, comparable and official data on the situation of children in the Member States. This is a serious problem for the development and implementation of a genuine evidence-based policy. The Fundamental Rights Agency has carried out important work in finding indicators to help develop policies in the area of the rights of the child. Thanks to the financial support of Parliament, the Commission will also be able to carry out a pilot project on developing child rights data collection for developing evidence-based policies. I am really grateful that the Members of this House share the interest of data collection, for instance in children’s effective access to justice. With the pilot project I mentioned, we will be able to have reliable and comparable data on children’s effective access to justice from all the Member States by 2013.
It is clear, of course, that if we want our policies to be effective we need money. There is no specific budget line called ‘policies for children’. But there are various programmes within our budget that provide funding aimed at children. We have, for instance, the Daphne programme with a budget of EUR 117 million providing financial support to NGOs and local authorities to combat violence against children. We have the Fundamental Rights and Citizenship Programme providing funding on children’s rights issues to national authorities and NGOs; and we have the Safer Internet Programme with a total budget of EUR 55 million aimed to empower and protect children online by awareness-raising initiatives.
Under the new multiannual framework programme 2014-2020, we will continue to fund policies to deliver child-friendly justice, to protect children and safeguard their rights. With a similar amount of funding as in the current generation of programmes, we will ensure a more efficient delivery for these actions and this will be achieved through streamlined programmes and a better response to the needs.
The EU agenda emphasised the importance of access to education and care services for small children. In the communication on early childhood education and care adopted earlier this year, the Commission set out key policy issues to be addressed at the European level to improve the accessibility and quality of service from birth to compulsory school age.
In the Council conclusions of May, the Member States were invited to analyse the current situation, to reinforce measures to improve access to high quality services and to invest in childhood education and care. The Commission will set up a thematic working group of policy-makers, academics and practitioners in early childhood education and care.
In the area of judicial cooperation in civil matters the Commission carefully monitors the correct application of the Brussels IIa regulation which provides for common rules on jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of judgment in matters of parental responsibility and cross-border parental child abduction.
The correct implementation of the Hague Convention on Child Abduction is critical here. The aim of the Convention, as you know, is to restore the status quo by means of the prompt return of wrongfully removed or retained children through cooperation between central authorities. In external relations the Commission actively promotes the signature of this Convention to other countries. Child abduction and missing children is a growing and a common problem, and unfortunately it will not go away. We need to find tools to deal with this; and tools for Member States to be able to cooperate with each other in cases where a child is abducted.
We have child alert systems designed especially for cases of extremely worrying disappearances of children, such as child abduction. To date a child alert system works in ten Member States and the Commission is committed to work with the other Member States so they are also rolled out in the remaining seventeen. We have been encouraging Member States to set up their own national child alert system and we support them operationally through the exchange of best practices, and financially in order to make sure that they are operational on a cross-border basis."@en1
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"Lutte anti-disparitions d’enfants"1
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