GwendalTsang/DEFT09-parquet huggingface dataset:
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Commissioner, as the first rapporteur – back in 1994-1995, I believe – on the subject of digital television and the standards pertaining to this, I would like to tell the present rapporteur how highly I rate the importance of the work he has done on this subject and to tell the Commission how much I appreciate the Commission communication. I feel that, over a period of a few years, we have all been able to gauge the progress made in this area and to emphasise that the initial choices which we made were valid ones. Incidentally, today, at a time when we are facing a significant stage of development, I think it important to stress that in all our policies we must find the necessary balance: between the Community approach and Community standards, on the one hand, and the specific national features and national disparities on the other hand; balance between the need, in terms of production, to cover a large European market and promote European products, i.e. developing ‘television without frontiers’, and, on the other hand, the ability to retain options as regards wavelength standards and local television. These are crucial issues for us, requiring the utmost flexibility on our part. At the outset, digital television was seen as something apart from high-definition television, another subject area that I knew well. Today, we are coming to realise that it enables vast flexibility and quantity. At present, we must strive to find a fair balance between what needs to be done at European level, what can be done at national level and at local level, since this has implications both for European and national action as regards deregulation, the market and technology. It was certainly important to sum up the situation regarding digital television at the present time. Once again I should like to congratulate Mrs Thors on the quality of her report and to say that I shall remain personally very attentive to the work done in this field. The important thing is to keep in mind that information, communication and television should be aimed primarily towards the citizens, and any inflexibility which might tomorrow prove an obstacle to a culture accessible to all should be avoided.

Political group: PSE
Naturally we are in favour of maximum air safety. We have, however, abstained on this report as it only addresses this matter from the point of view of the airlines and airport management bodies. As the rapporteur points out, it is also significant that the directive does not put forward a single measure with regard to the safety of communities living near airports. The European Parliament and Council consider this to be a question, principally, of establishing a unified system that will allow the European Union to exclude less safe aeroplanes from its airports and also to prevent certain Member States from being tempted, for commercial or other reasons, to be less strict with regard to the necessary controls. All well and good. The rapporteur, however, sees this as a means of restoring a feeling of safety among passengers, which will greatly benefit the airlines. At the same time, the European authorities are preparing to take serious safety risks with their Single Sky Project. These same European authorities can take all the steps they like – that may well exclude African, Latin American or Eastern European planes – but with the Single Sky and their privatisation projects, conditions in the European sky are going to end up more like a third-world sky.

Political group: GUE-NGL
The von Wogau report therefore proposes regulating arms exports and making them more ethical. One might as well try to make murder, plunder or abduction more ethical. The simple fact that the great powers are wasting enormous sums of money on weapons of mass destruction shows that the present organisation of society is barbaric. The governments of the great nations, who are responsible for criminal wars from Iraq to Afghanistan and accomplices of state terrorism in Palestine, would like to deny a number of smaller countries, whose regimes they do not like, access to weapons. They would like to do the same to certain organisations described by them as terrorist, and to the world of organised crime. Even that, however, is proving impossible. In an economy where arms dealers are willing to sell the rope to hang themselves if it makes them a profit, how can they be prevented from bypassing government controls? When the report welcomes the French initiative concerning the submission of a proposal for an International Code on Transparency, moreover, or refers to the European Union Code of Conduct on Arms Exports, that is both odious and ludicrous, since those countries are among the world’s leading arms exporters and are periodically shaken by politico-financial scandals involving highly placed politicians and arms dealers. A major arms dealer has recently been appointed to a ministerial post, representing a developing country at UNESCO. This is ample proof of how useless and ridiculous it is to attempt to bring morality into the arms trade. Legal proceedings have been opened against this individual, but he will now enjoy diplomatic immunity. Naturally, we are opposed to this report.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, it can still happen, or at least it cannot be ruled out, that contaminated primary products will find their way into animal feed again at some future juncture. Whether this will be intentional, in other words a criminal act, or accidental is not the subject of today's debate. If this does happen, however, it will be crucial to know which amounts of which contaminated primary product have entered the feed in question. An indication of components, summarised according to category and listed by descending order of percentage weight, would not, in our view, suffice for this purpose. It is therefore absolutely imperative that full details of all the primary products contained in compound feedingstuffs, together with the percentage volume of each, should be a statutory requirement. The Socialist Group endorses the statements made by the rapporteur in his conclusions on the open declaration of feed ingredients. This mandatory explicit declaration must be part of a comprehensive safety system governing the production of animal feed. Livestock feed is, after all, the main input in the production of meat. Defects in the safety and verification system increase the risk of further food scandals and ultimately lead to a loss of consumer confidence in meat as a food product. And it is always the farmer who suffers in the end. Farmers not only have to be able to rely on the information provided by the feedingstuffs industry; they must also be able to check, on the basis of the declaration, which volumes of which raw materials are contained in livestock feed. We believe that complete transparency for farmers is essential. Finally, I should like to express my sincere thanks to the rapporteur, Mr Graefe zu Baringdorf, as well as to Mrs Roth-Behrendt, for their contributions, and I hope that the Council will adopt a constructive position on this matter, so that we can jointly arrive at a transparent system of declarations for feedingstuffs. (Applause)

Political group: PSE
Mr President, I want to give an oral explanation of vote because what has happened, once again, is not very good news for our Parliament. In fact consumers, associations and all those concerned with the environment, with health, with the expected risks due to GMOs released into the environment, were expecting the European Parliament to send out a strong signal. Once again we have simply kowtowed to the lobby of the advocates of GMOs on the pretext that science will help to make the world a better place. We know full well that as yet there is no toxicology study that evaluates the consequences of releasing GMOs into the environment. So we can only regret that those amendments that went much further, that indeed allowed us to anticipate the implications of GMOs for nature, were not accepted. Mr President, I therefore condemn the kind of compromise reached between the major political groups, which goes against what the consumers and associations expected of us, as well as all those who trusted the European Parliament and who expect our Members to adopt firm positions.

Political group: Verts-ALE
Mr President, Commissioner, I would also like to join in congratulating the rapporteur, who I think has done an excellent job, and the rest of the members of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy, who have also worked hard. One of the objectives of this directive is to harmonise, and the directive has been drawn up – the Commission says so – to eliminate barriers to internal trade. But it does not fully harmonise, as there may be differences between the Member States in the way that they deal with the declarations on the products. Ladies and gentlemen, the internal market does not work. At the end of 2000 the number of violation proceedings initiated by the Commission associated with this problem was 27. According to the Commission, this diversity of regulations has created barriers to Community trade, and the principle of mutual recognition has not solved the problems. Harmonisation is therefore necessary. I am going to refer specifically to Amendment No 51, which is tabled by a group of us who have a series of problems, as the situation of lack of definition that the legislation of eight Member States is currently in could result in the production and sale of these food supplements, which are not included in this directive, being banned, once it is transposed. Meanwhile, the national legislation of the other Member States that regulate these food supplements would allow them to be produced and, as a result of the rules of the internal market, to be sold across the European Union. Commissioner, this is not harmonisation. We need to allow the production and sale of such substances in the countries where there is no national legislation, as long as their composition is identical to the substances that are already sold in one or various Member States, while Community rules, through its scientific committees, extend the scope of application of this directive.

Political group: PPE-DE
Commissioner, Mr President, I would like to speak out in favour of the equality of the regions with each other. Even if some have legislative competence, this would not give them greater or additional rights in relation to other regions. Otherwise, we would be establishing two-speed citizenship with first- and second-class Europeans. It falls to each State to give power to its regions if it wishes to do so. The matter is being debated in many of our countries, and in particular in my country, France, but not only there. It falls to each State to consult its local authorities and its regions within the context of European policies and their transposal. The Member States do not necessarily do this well, and could do better, but this is a good start. I would point out that the European Union is not the sum of its regions. It is a Union of States and peoples. Each State must remain master of its internal organisation, both at institutional and territorial level. That is laid down in the Treaties in their current wording and we must retain both the spirit and the letter of the Treaties. No country can claim to have a better system than another. No country can impose its system on another. Europe is a contract, not a constraint. If I had to summarise, I would say: yes to strong, fraternal regions within the European Union, yes to regions that cooperate outside their borders, but no to a Europe of regions which would be an unfair, variable-geometry Europe.

Political group: PSE
Madam President, this concerns the Fiori report which we voted on in Brussels last time. I have to say that this was Parliament at its worst. We had a temporary committee which met for ten months to discuss an issue that could have been discussed within the existing committees. Firstly, it was an abuse of the temporary committee status – Parliament is very fortunate to have this privilege, and I do not think that we should abuse it, especially in the way it was abused with that vote and the final outcome. As chairman of the Committee on Budgets, I would dearly love to know the cost of that temporary committee for an outcome that had nothing at the end of it. I would hope that, if we have temporary committees in future, they will deal with subjects outside the normal committee structure. If we have enquiries in the future, let us try to carry them out within the budget and not give rise to excess expenditure. (Applause)

Political group: PSE
Once the vote has been taken, this report on the common organisation of the market in pigmeat will simply add to the tonnes of paper of common agricultural market legislation. It is curious to observe how the rapporteur, albeit a supporter of the market economy, by talking of ‘cyclical movements’ in the market in pigmeat, attacks its ‘harmful effects’ in order to be moved by the ‘havoc’ it wreaks. We are opposed to the market economy, which is just as stupid and disastrous in regulating the economy as a whole as it is in regulating the production of pigmeat. However, we will not share the rapporteur’s cynicism, as he mourns the passing of the good old times when ‘the cessation of activity by small production units was enough to restore prices’. Even less do we share his view when he talks of the elimination of small producers which he, above all, uses to ask the European institutions for supplementary financing for large livestock producers. We need to prevent producers falling victim to the cyclical variation of the market. But the only true producers are those who work and run the pig farms, small farmers and agricultural workers, which definitely does not include those who are the primary focus of this report and who confine themselves to investing in this industry in order to make a profit with the aid of European Union grants.

Political group: GUE-NGL
We support Mrs Boumediene-Thiery ’s report. It is indeed time that we respected equal rights and abandoned the rationale of suspicion towards immigration. Member States take it upon themselves to refuse the right of residence to foreign students, even if they are enrolled at a recognised educational establishment, if they believe that they have changed direction or are not progressing quickly enough, which should be a decision left to the university authorities. This rationale of suspicion gives rise to obsessive references to the need for public order and the scandalous practice of double penalties. For the same crime, in addition to prison, foreigners are systematically and automatically expelled from a Member State. This banishment violates the principle of equality before the law that is enshrined in Article 7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Finally, it is important to facilitate the granting and renewal of permanent residence permits, as a residence permit of very brief duration leads to employment of very brief duration, discrimination and exploitation. Finally, the time has come to promote a European citizenship that is based on residence. The right to vote must be extended to non-Community nationals if we want to get rid of xenophobia and racism in Europe.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, Amendment No 3 has not been lodged with the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Human Rights, Common Security and Defence Policy. One amendment only has been lodged with that committee, namely Amendment No 6.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, in company with most of the Members who have spoken before me, I can only say that these reports leave us two essential lines of thought to follow. Firstly, this is a positive evaluation which is consistent with the Commission’s proposal. There are no borders when it comes to subjects such as our present concern of drug addiction and the trafficking of narcotics, and so it is certainly a useful, sustainable initiative to set objectives which include countries which are not currently Members of the European Union but which are in the pre-accession phase, countries taking part in the PHARE programme or Norway, in their prevention or suppression strategies, for this will help us to broaden the scope of our anti-drugs strategy. On the other hand, however, both the rapporteur and the Members have stressed that this occasion calls for reflection upon the way in which the Centre operates and upon the results it has produced in recent years, and I feel that we cannot say we are satisfied with its performance up until now. And quite apart from our own reservations, there is also an independent report, which has just been referred to, which outlines all the limits and shortcomings of this action. My fellow Member said that these changes will transform the Centre from a statistics office into a drugs monitoring centre. I wish it could be so but I cannot share her optimism. On the contrary, I fear that many proposals and concerns, including those voiced by other Members, will only serve the purpose of rationalising data and making it compatible. I was even somewhat surprised to hear Mrs Ghilardotti mention consumer safety. I would not like the Monitoring Centre for Drug Addiction to be likened to the Monitoring Centre for Food Quality and Safety! Let us be careful, for this is an extremely serious phenomenon which is damaging the whole of our society and destroying entire generations. We must fight against it. So, the efforts to make data from the different countries compatible and the call for efficient dissemination of the data are all very well, but if we think we can achieve these objectives, even our information objective, without taking into consideration the contributions made by the individuals concerned, Non-Governmental Organisations, voluntary associations and rehabilitation communities in the different countries, then we are living in a fantasy world. We must involve them, and then the Centre will be able to perform a genuinely effective and productive part – and we must monitor this – in the fight against drugs.

Political group: PPE-DE
Madam President, the events taking place today in Austria are extremely serious. For the first time, the European Union is facing the possibility of having representatives in the Council of Ministers and here among us of a party which obviously holds views and puts forward legislation contrary to the values of the European Union. I shall make three comments on this matter, to illustrate the gravity of the problem. I believe, personally, that this is the first stage, if it does actually take place, in the inclusion of extremists in governments becoming quite commonplace. I also believe it gives an extremely negative political message to the vulnerable democracies which are candidates for membership of the European Union and which are going to join us. (Applause) I feel, finally, that this is a case of political decline of the European Union as such and it therefore also sends a negative message outside the Union, when we are speaking in the name of democracy and human rights. Some people have said that we were interfering in problems internal to Austria. Some people have said that we were stigmatising the Austrian people and that we were effectively putting words into the mouth of a future government. Is it really putting words into someone’s mouth, if we pay attention to what a political leader has been saying for many years, when it shows an obvious tendency to go against everything that we want? We are not putting words into someone’s mouth or stigmatising the Austrian people if we send a friendly message, saying: friends, beware of what may soon happen in your country and what may contaminate the whole of Europe: not a radical change – I think Mr Haider is too intelligent for that – but a gradual erosion of democratic rights, a slow erosion, by cultural contagion, and that is extremely dangerous. (Applause) Let me thank you, Madam President, for your contribution on behalf of Parliament. It was both pertinent and politically intelligent. (Applause) I should also like to thank the Presidency of the Council for the firm, pertinent and moderate statement it has made. (Applause) Finally I should like to address the party which, whether we like it or not, is the target of our comments: the PPE/DE. I would like to address Mr Poettering and also, indirectly, Mr Martens, a compatriot and former colleague. I have heard, Mr Poettering, that you have been following events in Austria. I would rather have had you anticipate them and, particularly, condemn, on behalf of your party, the very principle of an alliance with people who practice verbal violence, who stigmatise the weak, who hold xenophobic views and who refuse to condemn the Nazi regime. (Applause) Mr Poettering, I do not doubt your concern for democracy but I believe that you are making a serious political mistake. And, to paraphrase one of my renowned fellow Belgians, one of the founders of Europe, Paul-Henri Spaak, I shall say that it is not yet too late for you, but now is the time to change your mind.

Political group: Verts-ALE
Mr President, is the text which has been presented as the compromise text to the Members of this House the same as that signed by the political groups, yes or no? The answer is no. Personally, I find it extremely dangerous that the presidency should be ratifying practices of this type which cast suspicion on the credibility and democracy within the sessional services.

Political group: Verts-ALE
In 1993 the European Union and the Member States undertook to liberalise the telecommunication services sector. This undertaking led to the adoption of a series of directives. Behind the regulations was a political objective of ensuring growth, employment and competitiveness and of giving everyone access to the information society while ensuring adequate legal protection. The Commission has played a supervisory role in this which has resulted in a series of reports since May 1997. The Commission communication before us today is part of this process and the assessment presented is balanced to say the least. Approximately two years after full liberalisation, the telecommunication services markets in the Member States are characterised by a rising growth rate, many new arrivals and falling charges. However, major problems remain. A ‘digital divide’ is apparent between both regions and citizens. The reason for this is clearly the cost of access to these new services. The exclusion of some citizens from the new information technology society cannot be tolerated. The preservation of universal service must therefore ensure the inclusive nature of this society. We must make certain that the regulations being prepared, which have been submitted to this Parliament, adopt this approach. Due to a desire to see the cost of access to the Internet lowered and for this to be accessible to all citizens, Parliament insists in its report on the need to open up competition in the local loop. This measure must be thoroughly discussed with the national authorities in order to respond to the relevant objections. A major effort must be made in terms of harmonisation and simplification of rules. I am thinking for example of the rules on consumer protection, those governing the operation and role of the National Regulatory Authorities (NRAs) and the licensing systems. To conclude, I would say that the telecommunications liberalisation process is not an end in itself but a step towards ensuring the transition to the information society. There is still a long way to go and we must not forget that the jobs created must be lasting and of a high quality.

Political group: PSE