Mr President, Commissioner, it is true that our legislature will have seen important steps forward in maritime safety and I would like to congratulate the Commission on its work. For me, the duty, or rather the right, to criticise you when necessary goes hand in hand with the duty to congratulate you when appropriate. And so far as safety at sea is concerned, I think the Commission has performed its task well and served the European general interest. While this report is not the greatest of all reports, it must nevertheless be seen as one of the achievements of the last four years. Having said that, the task has not been completed and you only have to read the Sterckx report to see how much a new legislature will be necessary in order to complete the work. However that may be, the starting point is simple: every vessel has a flag that belongs to a country, since there is no European flag. A move was made in that direction 15 years ago, but nothing ever came of it. The first text on changing registers goes back more than 10 years. The Commission proposal and the accompanying report by Parliament seek to adapt to the new situation, because a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. Like the Commission text, this report has three main thrusts. Firstly, it includes passenger ships. They were not included in the first directive for the reason given at the time, namely that the rules differed greatly from one State to another. That is why our committee and Parliament did not include passenger ships in the text at that time. Since then, however, a lot of important decisions have been taken – I am thinking in particular of the SOLAS convention – a lot of improvements have been made, rules have been aligned on many points, and it therefore seems appropriate now to include passenger ships in the regulation. The second thrust of the report involves a very similar argument, since it is about coordinating Community instruments in the area of maritime safety, in short integrating all the legislation that has been adopted piecemeal, in particular the packages known as Erika I and Erika II. Finally, the third thrust seeks to increase cooperation between national maritime authorities. These are therefore the three thrusts of my report, which, of course, correspond to those of the Commission proposal. While it is important to complete these reforms, it is also because Europe is about to grow and enlarge to take in ten new states. May I remind you that we are, indeed, about to welcome 10 States, but two in particular are island States with very large fleets, Malta and Cyprus, and it seems a good idea to get these rules settled before 1 May 2004. That is why the text should be adopted after just one reading in Parliament, as we did for single hulls at the time, so as not to lose time but to make maritime safety the objective rather than fighting over pure and simple questions of procedure, the idea being to find the most intelligent compromise, or at the very least the least stupid one possible. A number of amendments have been tabled by the Council, and your rapporteur proposes that they be adopted since they do not change the substance of the text. Some are technical changes, for example, specifying the ships to which the regulation does not apply, warships in particular. Some amendments also allow States to apply rules different from those of the SOLAS convention provided they are no less strict, while other amendments require each State to present an annual report and insist on the first of them to facilitate the implementation of the regulation. The most important demand comes from the Commission, which is insisting that, unlike other vessels, a vessel that has been detained more than once following an inspection in a port during the three years preceding the application for change of register should not be able to benefit from a simplified procedure. In short, it is a precaution for ships that have shown a number of weaknesses when controls were carried out. One of our colleagues has tabled an amendment seeking to have the emblem of the Union appear on the flag that changes register. I think that is a nice symbolic amendment and our committee voted in favour, but the Council does not want to adopt the amendment because it would only apply to vessels changing register and not to all of them. I am willing to abandon it, but I hope that one day the emblem of the Union will appear on our vessels’ flags so that, while the national flag will still appear, the little corner of Europe, too, will cross the seas of the globe. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the essence of this report and I hope it will have your backing.

Political group: PSE