Mr President, first may I say that I am delighted at this decision although, in this case, I am the one to suffer from this decision. I am standing in today for Mr Wuermeling, who drafted the opinion of the Committee on Legal Affairs, in which he says that it is important to make progress in relation to the recognition of final decisions in criminal matters. However, he also warns against overhasty and hurried centralism and considers that the Commission needs to define exactly what this means. Most importantly, the Commission should work out precisely what disadvantages have arisen so far because this system has not yet been developed to the extent called for in the Commission communication. We must admit that this is a very delicate subject. Because one thing we do not have in Europe is uniform criminal law. In my personal view, we never shall have uniform criminal law. That need not be a bad thing because even the United States of America, which are basically more centralistic than we imagine the European Union will ever be, even in the final stage of its development, have very different criminal laws. There are states which have the death penalty and there are other states which do not. In this respect, the EU is far more uniform. There is no place here for countries with the death penalty. Even England and Scotland have very different criminal laws and legal traditions. This means that not only must we be very careful in furthering unification and harmonisation while respecting diversity, we must also be very careful in how we recognise final decisions in criminal matters. We talk a great deal about a European community of values. And what complicates matters still further is that this European community of values is in fact drifting apart. One specific recent example is the euthanasia legislation in the Netherlands, with which the Netherlands have taken leave of the European legal culture hitherto, as has Great Britain on the question of cloning. So we are drifting apart in fundamental areas which are also relevant to criminal law. This will make mutual recognition more and more difficult. This too is a question which has to do with the different systems of values and with the different legal cultures. So we welcome progress in this area, but are very sceptical and simply see the problem of our drifting apart here, which is why we urgently call on the Commission to proceed carefully here, give precise definitions and simply say exactly what the need for unification consists of or what the disadvantages of the present system are. Of course we know that there are considerable problems today. However, the cases which I have quoted – and I could also have cited drugs policy as an example – show that, as far as criminal law is concerned, the European legal systems are drifting apart rather than moving together on particularly sensitive issues subject to intense public debate. This shows how important it is to continue our work on the area of freedom, security and justice, concentrating on the points which are really important to Europe and on the points where there is also real agreement between the Member States as regards standards in criminal law.

Political group: PPE-DE