Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2013-12-11-Speech-3-660-000"
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"en.20131211.73.3-660-000"2
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"Mr President, we have heard many times the mantra that this is an incentive-based system offering access to European markets in exchange for ratification and implementation of these 27 conventions. That only works if there is effective monitoring to ensure that there actually is implementation.
That is the purpose of the question from the committee: to find out how that is going to happen. I have to say that I do not think that the Commissioner has really answered that question yet because his basic answer was that what we have now on the scorecards is a starting point and it will be monitored from there. But if, at this starting point, we have scorecards that are full of lack of compliance with reporting requirements on multiple conventions, and if we have repeated references in the scorecards to serious abuses of human rights, of labour rights and so on, how is that a starting point?
The regulation explicitly says in Article 9 that a serious failure to effectively implement any of these conventions will be grounds for these countries not to access GSP+. So the Commissioner has to define what is a serious failure to implement because otherwise on what basis is this a starting point? I think too that we need to hear more from the Commission about how actually this process of monitoring is going to take place.
The only country to have lost GSP+ is the extreme example of Sri Lanka in 2010, after the Sri Lankan Government was guilty of murdering tens of thousands of Tamil people in what was described as genocide. Is that the only basis on which a country will be refused access to GSP+ or will be thrown out of GSP+? If that is the case, we have to redefine the word ‘incentive’.
Secondly, given that the scorecards are secret, that they are not public, how can this be a transparent process? How can you have an input from civil society in the GSP+ applicant countries? I think you need to have a public debate.
Finally, it is just intolerable – and a number of Members have spoken about it – that the Commission thinks it is an appropriate approach to come along with ten countries in one delegated act. It is simply fundamentally undemocratic and that is the purpose of it – to be undemocratic and to restrict the rights of this Parliament to properly scrutinise what the Commission is doing in terms of GSP+. I would like to hear a justification of it from the Commission and I would like to see Members across this House voting for the joint resolution from ourselves and the Greens in the vote tomorrow."@en1
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"Mr Paul Murphy,"1
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