Mr President, Commissioner, this Commission proposal on compensation and assistance to passengers in the event of denied boarding and of cancellation or long delay of flights has, at last – it is to be hoped – come to the end of its journey. Before going any further, I have to say that I believe conciliation has yielded the best possible outcome, given the fact that the process has been just as difficult and complex as that we have just been discussing. I will now summarise the key points of this conciliation, which focused on what had not been resolved at first and second readings, but I would also like to stress the essential and fairly simple concept underpinning this compromise: in other words, we have to consider the rights of air transport passengers as part of a more general context, as part of the whole system of air transport. A system in which all the players on the field, including control authorities, management authorities, airlines and the passengers themselves, are interdependent. Thus, the best way of guaranteeing effective passenger rights is to ensure the smooth running of this system: to make sure that none of the rules we want to introduce hampers this extremely sensitive, large-scale mechanism. As the Members will remember, the Commission’s initial proposal gave rise to huge numbers of concerns. Parliament attempted to address them by adopting 40 amendments. Then came a Council common position, which we immediately realised had improved the text, in particular as regards the then thorny issue of the amount of compensation, although other points which Parliament had raised had not been followed up. What were the most important of these points? They were those which concerned procedures for implementing the various levels of assistance to passengers in the event of cancellation or long delay of flights. Now, as regards these two points, long delay and cancellation of flights, I believe that the result we have achieved reflects to a great extent what the best airlines already offer to passengers voluntarily and only introduces one new element, namely the certainty of these rights for passengers, certainty which is not limited, even though extraordinary circumstances are not excluded. Indeed, we convinced the Council, and Parliament is pleased to have achieved this, that there is just one message we have to send out: ‘Dear passenger, we cannot guarantee you many rights, we can only guarantee you a few, but those which we guarantee are certain, they are not subject to conditions’. It would, indeed, be a mistake and counterproductive to raise expectations and then see these rights denied and these expectations crushed by the behaviour of airlines. I am talking about even the most basic rights such as, for example, the right to be able to have a drink, to be able to make a telephone call, to be able to contact friends or relatives. We have therefore produced a mechanism which introduces a tier-system for services which have to be provided to passengers, and, most importantly, a full range: from minimum service – on-the-spot assistance in airports in the event of cancellation of flights or excessive delays of over five hours – to some sort of compensation for damages, specifically financial compensation, which is the highest level of protection we have provided. I feel it is important to mention the agreement on mutual right of redress: this was an important point of the conciliation text because it allows, for instance, tour operators who have to comply with these regulations to claim from the air carrier operating the service where the air carrier is responsible for the provision of bad service. As you know, the other points are of minor importance, such as, for example, coherence with everything we had introduced at first reading. I will end, Mr President, by thanking all those who have helped to achieve this result, which I feel is to be supported, despite the pressure in recent hours from a number of lobbies who are doing everything they can to stop the text being adopted.

Political group: PPE-DE