Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2013-03-12-Speech-2-013-000"
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"en.20130312.4.2-013-000"2
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"Madam President, one of my first acts as a Member of Parliament here some 14 years ago was to host a meeting about another food crisis, between some Cumbrian beef farmers from my region and your predecessor, who was entirely sympathetic to their cause and wanted to support them in getting Member States to take action, but pointed out that the Commission had no army, had no police force. It was, as you said, dependent upon the Member States to enforce the law in the first instance.
Now, I have reflected upon this many times over the years, and I keep thinking of those words which we see in so many pieces of legislation: effective, proportionate and dissuasive. Your Director-General has said to the committee that we have the best food labelling laws in the world, but they do not count for very much unless Member States actually put them into practice. We have penalties in different Member States that differ. We have procedures for ensuring compliance that differ. We have a different approach being taken to potential prosecutions, and we have sentences being laid down by national courts that differ.
Now on the one hand, I think the public expects European laws to be enforced equally and effectively in every Member State. Otherwise people say ‘why should I comply if they are not?’ On the other hand, we have the difficult problem that the European Union should not be imposing common criminal penalties upon Member States. This is not just an issue, of course, for your department – it is one for many other sectors of the Commission – but it needs to be brought into the open. There needs to be more discussion and more analysis of the way in which Member States are actually putting legislation into effect, not simply in terms of the Statute, but also in the way in which their courts and their prosecuting bodies then interpret that Statute. This is because, unless we do this, unless we bring this out into the open and unless we decide to name and shame and have discussions in the Council and the Parliament, then we will not ensure equal application of the law. Failure to do so brings the law into disrepute and frankly renders the work of all us invalid."@en1
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