GwendalTsang/DEFT09-parquet huggingface dataset:
Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, the European statute on political parties, which we are debating today, is long overdue. I should therefore like to thank the Commission for helping us, together with the European parties and the groups, to close this gap in European-level legislation in this parliamentary session. The provisions being introduced here have been national law and have applied to the national parties in all the Member States for a long time, despite varying rules. To all those who are now talking about parties I do have to say that each of us is sitting here because he was the candidate of a political party at national level. We are after all living in a multi-party democracy. Parties are not an end in themselves. They are an essential part of a functioning democracy and constitute a link between citizens, the groups and the public in the opinion-forming and decision-making process. In approving the Regulation that we are discussing today, we are making a contribution towards strengthening European democracy, intensifying the opinion-forming process and the debate within Europe and making the national parties more European. The Regulation helps to increase transparency in respect of the funding of political work, create greater clarity, and separate group and party work, something which the – my friend Alejandro Agag has spoken about this – has been working hard to achieve for some time already, harder than the other parties. In addition it contributes to guaranteeing the right of the European Court of Auditors to monitor the affairs of the European parties. This Regulation is, however, also a basic prerequisite for a debate which we need to have on common electoral law and on common rules governing incompatibility for Members of Parliament in the different countries, and a prerequisite for the debate on the possibility of European parties standing in European parliamentary elections. It contributes to making the post-Nice process more democratic. We, the , want more transparency and we want to strengthen the people's Europe, instead of having more closed doors – read the Council – and secretariats. We are in favour of the right to have recourse to legal action, enshrining the Charter of Fundamental Rights as a qualitative pre-condition for parties, European parties having legal personality and putting an end to cross-financing. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE
Madam President, drug addiction is a complicated problem with significant social consequences for the user and for his or her environment, with risks to health and ongoing crime. There are, however, not only social consequences, but also social causes. Our rapporteur, Minerva Malliori, deserves our firm support for her approach. A tailor-made approach; as drug users are not all the same, the prevention of drug use and drug addiction must be based on respect for the drug user. There has been a great deal of disagreement over the years about the approach to the drugs problem, all of which involve firm stances. The Commission has opted for a policy of risk reduction or damage limitation. Rightly so, as risk reduction can limit the impact on health. A policy of monitoring substances and clean hypodermic syringes can save lives. Naturally risk reduction must not lead to complacency, however. We cannot relax about the addiction problem. Conversely, the policy of damage limitation is precisely what makes a convincing approach to drugs crime possible. There thus does not need to be a huge contrast between the policy of damage limitation and the policy of drug prevention. We should be receptive to the benefits of each approach. Mrs Malliori’s local approach can achieve a great deal, and the establishment of mobile low threshold help services is a good idea. We do not, however, have to strive towards a uniform approach, although we must be willing to learn from one another. We must compare the approaches to see which is effective in countering addiction. This report is a good opportunity for us to familiarise ourselves with the approach in various countries. I warmly invite my fellow Members to come and see how it is done in the Netherlands. My thanks and appreciation to Mrs Malliori again.

Political group: PSE
Mr President, I respect your tenureship of the chair and I yield to no one in that, but I wonder how you can justify the fact that you indicate a time and then in the case of several speakers absolutely ignore it. I do not cast any judgement over the previous speakers or the substance of their remarks, but, if people have been allocated a period of three minutes, to give them 50% more is insulting to those people who have spoken earlier and have kept rigidly to their time. I wonder whether you could justify why you have decided to ignore the clock?

Political group: PSE
Mr President, the MEDIA programmes are designed to strengthen European industry and the audiovisual content through measures providing financial support to specific sectors such as development, the preparation stage of projects, the distribution and marketing of audiovisual works, the promotion of European works and programmes with the aim of facilitating access to European and international markets, and training aimed at improving occupational preparation. The adoption of the Media Plus and Training programmes is important; the autonomous role of the promotion sector is important; the significant role of distribution is important for an increasingly wide distribution of works; the complementarity between Media Plus and Media Training should be increased as much as possible. The Commission should take Parliament's contribution to heart and accept all the amendments – both those to the training part, which is subject to codecision, and those to the development, distribution and promotion part, which is merely subject to the consultation procedure and which, moreover, receives the greatest share of the budget. The amendments are the result of some very clever work, Mrs Hyeronymi, and, as Chairman, I would like to compliment you and reiterate that you have won the unanimous support of the Committee on Culture, Youth, Education, the Media, Education and Sport and the committees which expressed opinions. The latter Committees – the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market and the Committee on Industry, External Trade, Research and Energy – have done something significant in approving the proposal to change the legal basis of Media Plus, inserting Article 157 (industry) and Article 151 (culture) in order to give equal value to industry and the audiovisual sector. The Commission has already indicated through press agencies that it opposes this amendment. I am sorry but we are not satisfied with the response and we would have preferred to have heard the Commission's position in this debate and not through press statements. In any case, we call for an increase in the budget and we hope that Parliament and the Commission will be able to achieve unanimity and an agreement on this issue as well.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, my colleague Erik Meijer's report is of the greatest interest, as it touches on a core issue in services of general interest, that is, the guaranteeing of citizens' mobility within their immediate surroundings. This fundamental citizens' right was formerly predominantly guaranteed by local public services and their agents. As local public transport is mainly unprofitable, services are subsidised by the local authorities, which of course makes the local transport market interesting for private-sector service providers. The public local transport market in Germany alone is valued at some DM 30 billion. The creation of the internal market and the rise of international companies offering public transport services has led to a conflict between the previous practice of awarding transport concessions directly to local service providers on the one hand, and the international firms on the other. The Commission has therefore proposed to give competitive rules the edge over public interest and to create a new and binding obligation to put contracts out to tender. The rapporteur is, in my view quite right to question this procedure. He would give local authorities the right to decide for themselves how contracts are to be awarded. That is democracy; that is the subsidiarity principle. There must be no interference by the European Union in the conditions applied at local and regional level. I see this as a fundamental issue, as it is evidence of real subsidiarity. I appeal to my fellow Members of this House, although I know that there is little point in doing so, to support this position. We had many meetings and discussions with local, regional, national and international operating companies and interest groups, so of course highly detailed proposals were the result. Now, you do not have to agree with all these suggestions, but the basic line taken by the Meijer report corresponds to the demands of local public transport as seen by local authorities and operators, does not, contrary to what you said, Mr Schmitt, exclude the possibility of introducing competition, and safeguards local and regional transport services accessible to all and which citizens can afford.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, unlike several of those who have spoken in today’s debate, I am inclined to endorse the Andersson report, one of the reasons for this being that I can see clear differences between the report and the Commission’s communications. In particular, I am referring to the fact that this report – and I would like to congratulate the rapporteur on this – defends the European social model’s approach, which is one based on solidarity. I would like to highlight the clear positions adopted against social dumping, together with the right to a basic level of social security, the goal of social convergence, and, in particular, the quite specific points that have been made about equal opportunities for women being the primary objectives of this social policy. I can certainly see that it has its shortcomings in failing to undertake a sufficiently rigorous analysis of macroeconomic policy within the European Union, and it is this policy which stands in the way of the aforementioned solidarity-based revival of the European social state, model. All in all, though, I deem this report to be worthwhile.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, I want to thank Mr Costa Neves for his efforts on behalf of all of us in this procedure and to say that it is a very technical and difficult task he took on: he has discharged it with great skill and shown much patience and kindness to all of us who wanted our ideas taken into consideration. I have not known a Commissioner who has followed the proceedings so closely or who has spent so much time with the Committee on Budgets as the present Commissioner. Of course, in many ways this is a highly technical exercise and, unlike national budgets, it does not have much effect on the course of economic development in the European Union. It is too small for that, even in the area of Structural Funds, for even the most generous beneficiaries receive a very small percentage of GNP. Ireland, at the best, was getting 2%, Portugal and the poorer areas of Spain are getting between 1% and 2% of GNP. It is not a very generous outlay of money, but if we can use it in order to guide their economic policies in the direction that we think is best, then the money can be usefully spent. There is one idea and one hope that I have always entertained. I believe I said some years ago that compared to national parliaments we were like children playing shop. The amount of resources at our disposal is so small and there is so little we can do with them, but there is one area that I would like to see developed. I do not want to see an expansion of public spending at European level. But in the area of economic cooperation and development, if we could only pool at European level the resources which the countries of the European Union and the European Union itself devote to international cooperation and development cooperation, we could convert individual national efforts into a common European effort without increasing the sum of taxation. This is essential if we are to develop a common foreign and security policy. I believe we could have a much greater impact on the development of the poorer countries and redirect our foreign policy in a way that we could help the poor, help to establish peace and give us real influence in the world. If there is one area in which we should demand subsidiarity from the national states to the European Union, it is here.

Political group: PPE-DE
I have abstained in the final vote. The report was adopted by 211 votes to 84, with 46 abstentions. Turkey must revoke its 30-year occupation of Cyprus and acknowledge the genocide of the Christian minorities of Armenians and Syrian-Assyrian-Chaldeans in 1915-1918, which cost 1.5 million people their lives. The EU as a proponent of peace is undermined if Turkey is allowed to enter into negotiations regarding EU membership in a situation in which the country continues to be an occupying power in the northern part of the new EU member, Cyprus. EU Member States do not occupy one another. Historic blunders must be acknowledged in order to alleviate the suffering and sorrow of the minorities affected. Only thus can we embrace a new future. Germany would never have been considered a democracy or been able to become an EU member if it had denied the Holocaust, the genocide of the Jews, during the Second World War. Turkey has everything to learn from this.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, I can confirm that the votes were indeed announced on the television screens. And it was thanks to that that I realised it was time to come to the Chamber to vote. Having said that, I have requested the floor simply in order to say to the British Members that if they think they are wasting their time here and do not have enough time to dedicate to the work of the committees, I suggest that they miss the Brussels sittings. In that way, we will have enough time in Brussels to work in committee and we will be able to dedicate all our time to the plenum here in Strasbourg until Friday morning. I believe that would cause no more problems: we would not waste our time and we would be working under very good conditions. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, we are a long way off from fulfilling the euphoric proclamations of the Lisbon Summit of March 2000 on full employment and on making the Union the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010. The slowdown in economic growth, the relocation and closure of companies accompanied by further redundancies, higher employment and increased social difficulties demonstrate the danger of the approach that has been pursued. This approach involves speeding up liberalisation and privatisation, the insistence on the primacy of monetary policies and of competition, the deregulation of the labour market and of labour legislation and making these more flexible. These factors clearly demonstrate the need for a sea-change in the neo-liberal guidelines and policies currently practised, which will not happen as a result of the proposals that have been presented to us. The Commission acknowledges, however, that the lack of up-to-date data still hampers the detailed study of what is happening in the field of poverty and social exclusion. Furthermore, little progress has been made in preventing early school leaving and in reducing gender inequality and the guidelines that have been presented, specifically in the field of social security, structural reforms of the labour market of work based on making work more flexible and more precarious and on wage moderation, and for pursuing the process of liberalisation in an increasing number of sectors, tend to aggravate the current situation. By accentuating the unilateral approach to the liberalisation and greater flexibility of the goods, services, capital and labour force markets, ignoring economic and social cohesion, the Commission and the Council are contributing to increasingly significant social problems and to hampering economic recovery. Consequently, as we highlighted in the resolution tabled by my group, it is crucial that the objectives of full employment, the harmonisation of social conditions in order to achieve progress, economic and social cohesion and development are defined as priorities for the Spring Summit. Social and employment policies cannot remain subordinated to strict compliance with the criteria of nominal convergence and make it urgent to redefine the mandate and powers of the European Central Bank. Sustainable development with a view to achieving social and ecological conversion must be founded on a thorough overhaul of the irrational criteria of the stability pact, given the diversity of the economic and social situation of the various countries. It also requires a more equitable distribution of wealth, an overhaul of social protection systems in a way that demonstrates solidarity, and requires public and social investment, particularly in education, research and in the knowledge-based economy. Consequently, as demanded by workers and citizens almost everywhere, including in Portugal last weekend, for example, at the impressive demonstration in Lisbon, it is time to heed the calls of the citizens and the workers.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, this concerns a matter arising from the Minutes in connection with the distribution of the report promised by Mr Kinnock in response to my oral question on Monday, which was raised in the Chamber yesterday afternoon. I should like to confirm that this report is available. I received it by e-mail from Mr Kinnock’s office, but as far as I can tell it has not yet been officially distributed to Members. I know that Mr Kinnock was very keen that we should all have it as soon as possible so can I ask you once again to make sure that this is distributed. On the same topic could I ask you, Mr President, on behalf of all the Members of this Parliament, if we could have a similar report to the one prepared by the Commission on the progress of the human resource reforms as regards the work that is going on with the staff of Parliament. We are currently in a position where we know less about the progress of the personnel reforms in this House than we do in the Commission. Could I ask you to discuss with your colleagues and arrange for a statement and a report to be made to this House as soon as possible about the progress of these crucial reforms which were solidly supported by the House when it approved my report last year?

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, I feel I must request the floor because I find this situation intolerable and wish to protest at the great number of speeches from large political groups in this Chamber that have sought, this morning, to link terrorism with immigration, asylum seekers and, more than once and in a direct manner, immigration of Islamic origin. This seems a very irresponsible attitude to me, a time-bomb threatening peaceful coexistence, and I would like to remind you all that many a terrorist with white skin has been born to the world from our own European continent.

Political group: PSE
Mr President, the representatives of our group in the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market have familiarised themselves thoroughly with this matter, and I too represent our group in this Committee. We are fully aware of the political sensitivity of this issue. We do not, however, want this issue to be used against us for political purposes. Supported by a majority, our Group concluded that the opinion of the majority of the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market was justified. We must make it clear, however, that if there is to be a vote in the part-session on this matter, i.e. on whether the mandate of Mr Le Pen should be terminated, the majority of the French delegation in our Group will vote in favour of this termination.

Political group: Verts-ALE
I voted for the report on the Constitutional Treaty despite a number of gripes about it, and so I am keen to clarify a number of points. The extension of majority voting to a range of areas is, in an ever-expanding EU, something to be welcomed. I regard the automatic abolition of unanimity – something provided for only in exceptional cases anyway – in order to transform it into a super qualified majority after 2009, as being premature at the present time. Why announce now something that is due to happen in 2009? I am glad that this passage, which was present in the first draft, has now disappeared. I voted against paragraph 22 of the resolution, as I regard the allocation of Members in the European Parliament, as laid down in the protocol on enlargement appended to the Treaty of Nice, as balanced. It is, however, not acceptable for the number of MEPs from Luxembourg to be cut by one-third. I agree with Mr Juncker, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, that the proposals relating to the presidency of the specialised Councils of Ministers are unclear, in other words, that they still need some clarificatory amendments. Nor is the creation of two classes of Commissioner – with and without voting rights – ideal. Which country is getting a junior Commissioner, and when? These are all questions that remain to be resolved.

Political group: PPE-DE
Since Mrs Patrie’s legitimate request to refer the report back to committee was rejected and the amendments from the have not been adopted, I voted against the report along with my three colleagues from the Republican, Radical and Citizens’ .

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, I should like to begin by congratulating Mr van Hulten on this very thorough report, which has deservedly received the unanimous support of the other members of the Committee on Budgetary Control. I wish to say, Commissioner, that this report is only an interim measure, which means that it is the first step towards building a bridge between our present system of control and the system that we would like to achieve through the reform. The draft version of the reform of the Financial Regulation is still not available in all languages. Furthermore, the White Paper states, quite unnecessarily, that at the end of the interim period, the Council will be able to take into account whether or not the Financial Regulation has been approved. The need for legal certainty requires us to bring forward the deadlines for this interim period, which has given rise to many reservations in this Parliament, since it seems that we want to have our cake and eat it; in other words, we want to move ahead, but without giving up the precautions that are currently in place. There are overlaps, which means that responsibility is being diluted. Expenditure is doubling but there is no assessment of posts, and so many people are doing the same thing. The staff involved are neither being given responsibility nor being motivated. This interim period, as stated in the White Paper presented by the Committee on Budgetary Control, is being extended indefinitely. I urge you, Commissioner, to ensure that the interim period ends as soon as possible. We know what we want and it is the will of this Parliament, but it is crucial that the transitional period should not be extended beyond what is strictly necessary. I therefore feel that, when it comes to drawing up and suggesting the agendas for the Presidencies, you should not ask us to head straight for the objective we wish to achieve, regardless of the time needed to make the changes in the audit. There has also been a certain carelessness, of which I am sure the Commissioner will take note, so that we will, as soon as possible, achieve the aim of this reform which we began with the van Hulten report.

Political group: PPE-DE