Mr President, I too, like Mr Corbett, welcome the way our rapporteurs, Mr Duff and Mr MacCormick, have tackled the shortcomings of the procedures for deciding the immunity of the Members of the European Parliament. The European Parliament must, in the future, have its own system of immunity which ensures equal treatment for all its Members, irrespective of which country they belong to. This could be one of the many tasks of the Convention on the Future of Europe. In the meantime, however, it is necessary to resolve a number of issues which have emerged during this legislature, particularly with regard to the case of the Spanish investigations regarding Mr Berlusconi and Mr Dell’Utri. In that case, the Presidency of Parliament interpreted the Rules of Procedure in such a way that the request from the Spanish judicial authorities was considered not to be appropriate and was therefore not referred to the competent committee or examined in the European Parliament until the person in question was no longer a Member of the European Parliament. The request was considered in that case as being made by a foreign authority and having to be communicated through the government and its diplomatic representations. However, in the European Community, the judicial authorities of the Member States cannot be considered to be the authorities of foreign countries and as having to be represented solely by their respective governments. The proposal to amend Rule 6 of the Rules of Procedure on the need for every request for defence or waiver of immunity made by any authority of the Member States to be announced immediately to Parliament and referred to the committee responsible is therefore appropriate. The issue addressed by Mr MacCormick’s report also arose in relation to the cases of the Italian Members. Article 9 of the Protocol on the Privileges and Immunities of the European Communities states that, as happens in all democratic countries, the Members of the European Parliament cannot be prosecuted in respect of opinions expressed by them in the performance of their duties. This is not a relative immunity which can be waived by Parliament but an absolute immunity. It is laid down by a European rule, which it is the responsibility of the judges of the Member States to interpret and enforce. However, in Italy, it has become customary for Members of the national parliament to be able to invoke their parliament’s protection in cases in which they feel their privilege has been unjustly denied or misinterpreted, and it was therefore considered that, by analogy with the provisions of Article 10 of the Protocol, this national custom should also be adopted at European level. This interpretation has now been included in the Duff report as a general solution, and it is therefore proposed to amend the Rules of Procedure to give Members the right to request that their immunity and privileges be defended, thus affording greater protection of privileges and immunity. To support these proposals is to assert our faith in the dignity of politics, in its capacity and in its will to guarantee democracy in the general interest and not to preserve the privileges of a few against the principle of the equality of all the citizens. It is a faith that I persist in wanting to preserve, although it has too often been disappointed, as in the case of one of the specific proposals contained in the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market’s report, which goes so far as to classify the opinions expressed by Mr Dell’Utri before he became a Member as opinions expressed during the performance of his duties. For these reasons, I will be voting for the amendment proposed by Mr MacCormick.

Political group: PSE