GwendalTsang/DEFT09-parquet huggingface dataset:
Mr President, I too would first of all like to congratulate the rapporteurs, Mr Mastorakis and Mr Pomés Ruiz, for drafting very successful reports. Economic and social disparities between the Member States have lessened, but inequalities within the Member States have persisted and even deepened. The report reiterates Parliament’s stance on pursuing an inclusive Community cohesion policy. After enlargement a large share of regional and structural aid will go to the new Member States. That is inevitable. We must not, however, pit regions in difficulties in the present Union against poor regions in the new Member States. Through united efforts we can take care of both. Our group supports the main arguments in the reports. I am not going to go over the content of the reports again here, but I would like to highlight the importance of a few matters. The reports call for combining regional policy with other policies. With regard to economic, agricultural, transport and competition policy, for example, regional considerations should be taken into account more. When the Union enlarges, the need to reform regional policy will intensify. Our group backs the Commission’s aims to simplify and clarify regional policy and urges them to accomplish this. At the same time, we have to make improvements in result orientation and programme quality, and the role that the regions play alongside the Member States and the Commission must be strengthened. This will demand determined work on the part of the Commission and the Member States also. The new programming period can no longer afford the burdensome levels of administration that frequently afflict the current regional and structural policy, and the delays and apparent messing around that is associated with it. It is important that the special features of regions suffering from permanent geographical handicaps are recognised and identified and that solutions are sought for them. Islands, mountain regions and sparsely populated regions all have the same kind of problems. There are many in our group who have been active in trying to solve the problems of island and mountain regions. I myself know best the sparsely populated regions of the north. Development in the Union’s northernmost region is overshadowed by long distances, a low density of population, a cold climate and an ageing population as a result of people moving away in droves. The same region nevertheless holds many great opportunities. I am grateful to Mr Pomés Ruiz for proposing that sparsely populated regions in the north should be taken into account in the Union’s constitutional treaty. Mr Pomés Ruiz’s report has increased cohesion. We understand one another better now. The problems in the various less favoured zones can be solved through good levels of cooperation as part of the Union’s cohesion policy.

Political group: ELDR
draftsperson of the opinion of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy. – The Environment Committee is generally pleased with the Commission’s communication and we are also pleased that the Fisheries Committee adopted all our amendments. It is now widely accepted that fishing has effects on marine environment which are much more wide-ranging and pervasive than simple capture of target species with a little bit of by-catch. We welcome the intention of the Commission to integrate environmental protection into other policies of the EU including the common fisheries policy. After all, the treaties have stipulated since 1992 that the precautionary principle and environmental protection should be integrated into Community policies. But as has been pointed out, the adoption of a rigorous definition of the precautionary principle is crucial. This is because it is all very easy to pay lip service to the idea and then to continue with business as usual. The UN Fish Stocks Agreement of 1995 would serve as a very good model in this regard. One aspect that was missing from the communication though is the aspect of surveillance and control. All the good policies and regulations in the world will not lead to conservation without an effective system to ensure that the rules are respected. Control is a Member State competence and the Council has recently adopted a list of serious infringements aimed at coordinating to some extent the severity with which similar violations are viewed in different countries. This is a good step forward, but as the Commission and the Fisheries Committee continually point out, much improvement is needed in the control programmes of all Member States. I would like to congratulate the rapporteur on his excellent report.

Political group: Verts-ALE
Mr President, the reduced time allotted to the co-rapporteur means that I have to reduce the problem of the accession of Cyprus to a Shakespearian question: one State or two, that is the question. Obviously accession to the European Union is open to only one Cypriot State as far as international law is concerned. That means that the representatives of the two communities on the island will have to agree on a constitutional formula which will enable the new Member State to participate in the decision-making process and to assume all its obligations under Community law. Only a federal model, in other words the model which is recommended in the United Nations Security Council Resolutions, fulfils this objective. Any theories based on the existence of two sovereign States which would be linked together by a vague treaty of partnership rather than via a solid, democratic and freely accepted constitution, would give rise to fictitious and inoperable structures which would be unacceptable from the legal viewpoint. We are now entering into the final stretch of the negotiation process. The current window of opportunity, the opportunity to resolve a forty-year old conflict, will close at the end of this month. I should like to emphasise here that it is precisely the European dimension which provides the opportunity to transcend the old quarrel about sovereignty. Jean Monnet said that in order to change the facts of a problem it was enough to change its framework. As the rapporteur, I hope that the negotiators will find, in the words of Jean Monnet, the inspiration for a final effort. If not, the Republic of Cyprus would be admitted by the European Council of Copenhagen on the same terms as the other candidate countries. Cyprus fulfils all the required conditions, and has now completed twenty-four of the thirty-one chapters of the accession negotiations. There is therefore no doubt but that it will form part of the first wave of accessions.

Political group: PSE
Madam President, with financial instruments becoming ever more complicated and data being transmitted over the Internet in a matter of seconds, it is no longer easy to distinguish between appropriate use of insider information and abuse. So in Germany, for example, only ten charges have been brought, because the definition was not clear enough to justify time-consuming and costly legal proceedings. The Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs unanimously supports the comitology arrangements, reflecting the Lamfalussy report and its parliamentary counterpart, the von Wogau report. We attached a great deal of importance to a new definition of insider information. This is information that is not generally accessible and which directly or indirectly concerns issuers of financial instruments. It is information which, if it became public knowledge via traditional or electronic media, could appreciably influence share values or prices. Manipulation is considered to exist in cases where false or misleading information on important facts is deliberately given and third parties stand to gain directly or indirectly. We managed to prevent special rules applying to journalists, who should not be treated any differently to anyone guilty of market manipulation. However, freedom of the press is guaranteed in each and every case. We have adopted guidance for Member States on the enactment of sanctions and other measures. We have agreed on principles as proposals for the Commission, to enable it to exercise its implementation powers. We have drawn up a list of financial instruments to ensure that new products fall within the scope of the directive. And we have emphasised the importance of 'Chinese Walls' as a preventive measure in combating market abuse, and have called for specific control of this in individual companies. We agreed that a central authority should be set up or expanded in each EU Member State in order to exercise effective control. This is intended to bring together the various competences of national bodies so that they can closely cooperate with similarly structured authorities in other states. I regard the agreement between Parliament, Commission and Council on most of the proposals as a great success. Special thanks are also due to the rapporteur, Mr Goebbels; as shadow rapporteur for the Group of the and the , I wish to congratulate him on his ability to work out good compromises which incorporated many of our amendments. The work done on revising the directive, which is also geared to new developments, should lead to greater coherence on Europe's financial markets and above all to more trust on the part of investors: the outlook is therefore good for a particularly sensitive area of our globalised economy.

Political group: PPE-DE
The European Central Bank, in spite of having a financial role in European policies and the economy, operates independently of the Council, of the European Parliament and of national parliaments, which is unacceptable. Regrettably, this is an example of the lack of democratic control on the part of these institutions. By taking the fulfilment of the Stability Pact and of the respective criteria for nominal convergence as a basis, and making price stability the main priority, the ECB’s monetary guidelines come to be crucial for national and European policies in a huge variety of economic and social areas, including in the Financial Perspective of the European Union and of the Member States. Thus it is vital that the ECB finds another means of intervention, that there is effective democratic control over the way it operates, that priority is given in European policies to resolving the economic and social problems of the European Union and of its Member States, giving particular prominence to the policies of growth and job creation. That is the reasoning behind my vote.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, unfortunately the action plans of the High Level Working Group on Asylum and Migration hardly do justice to the task in hand. If you read the action plans carefully, you will see that most space is devoted to measures to combat illegal immigration. This is not the only problem, however. No consideration is given to development policy or foreign policy measures to deal with the reasons which make people flee and emigrate from these regions. Although the High Level Working Group itself has concluded that human rights violations are an important reason why people flee, too little account of this is taken in the action plans. Let us look at the situation in Iraq. Clearly it is not easy at present to make suitable proposals for Iraq which might have some chance of being implemented, given the current political situation. The same applies in Afghanistan, where one is uncertain as to whom one should even start discussions with. Whom should we urge to respect human rights? The way in which the High Level Working Group was set up and operates also gives cause for criticism. The European Parliament was consulted on neither the appointments to the group nor the crisis regions selected. This modus operandi is unacceptable. Mr Hernández Mollar’s report is highly critical of the work of the High Level Working Group. The report now gives us the opportunity to develop a new basis on which to evaluate the work of the High Level Working Group and my group therefore supports the rapporteur.

Political group: Verts-ALE
The generally-worded title of the Community directive before us conceals an important step towards the privatisation of ports, especially the services which they provide, such as pilotage, towing and docking ships, loading and unloading and storing goods and moving passengers. The aim is not to improve the port services provided; it is to sell off yet another publicly owned sector to big business and hand a complete infrastructure over to the private monopolies so that they can make use of and profit from it. The unavoidable consequences will be a reversal in labour relations and rights and a tragic drop in safety standards for workers, for passengers on board ships and in the services provided. We want to stress from the outset that we are opposed and completely reject both the directive and the Jarzembowski report. We refuse to be party to a line of thinking that accepts privatisation as inevitable and endeavours to rescue a few individual services. On the contrary, we steadfastly support the argument for public port services and ports whose operations are integrated into an overall development plan which develops the potential of each country, supports the economy and employment and guarantees the safety of human life in port and at sea. These are highly sensitive issues for Greece, with its large number of island complexes and its sovereignty in the Aegean, a sensitive area from the economic, social and national security standpoints. We would also point out that multipurpose ports such as Piraeus, which support and serve the shipbuilding and repair industry, can only do their job efficiently if they remain in the public sector. This endeavour is more than infuriating or provocative. It is an attempt to intervene in the operational unit itself, that is, the port, and to prohibit it from doing what any enterprise does, that is, from operating as a single entity. It breaks up and imposes internal competition between services provided by the same service provider. At the same time, the directive talks about prerequisites for ‘public services’ but leaves them at the mercy of the private sector. The Communist Party of Greece is fighting, alongside the workers, for uniform, 100% public-sector port services, so that they are able to operate, develop and connect with other sectors of the economy. If we want properly operating ports, safety, coordination and development, we need to support a single, vertically-integrated service, with each activity helping and supporting the other. Otherwise, the smooth and efficient operation of the sector will be at risk, any attempt at coordination will be doomed to failure and safety will be thrown to the winds because it will be subject to the laws of profit and competition and will have to rely upon the goodwill of the enterprises. That is why we voted against the Jarzembowski report.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, the priority given to financial and monetary criteria reinforces the increase in inequalities of every shape and form. As far as French planning experts are concerned, for example, the most probable scenario today is that of the entrenchment of regional disparities within each country. Well, the Structural Funds have helped to apply a brake to this process. Our project of a Europe that aims to satisfy social needs envisages the convergence of living conditions towards the highest common denominator. Its implementation would certainly require extending the scope of redistribution instruments such as the Structural Funds. What we are proposing specifically is a unified capital tax, which would make it possible to boost the funds used to support the harmonisation of social protection systems and the reduction of working hours at European level. The Commission, however, though bound to issue guidelines, does so only reluctantly and in a vague manner. The report put forward today re-establishes its place in the political sphere. It is one of the steps towards a policy of employment and sustainable development. This is what persuades us to vote in favour of it.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, I wish to condemn the arrest, by the armed forces of Colombia, of Rubiel Vargas, a member of the Executive Committee of the Columbian Communist Youth and correspondent of the independent news agency Ancol. This arrest comes two months after the arrest of Gabriel Becerra, Secretary-General of the Communist Youth and representative of the social and political front of Colombia, on 23 January. Luz Perly Córdoba, a trade unionist from the agricultural movement Campesina de Arauca, was arrested on 18 February and the communist Marίa Lucero Henao was murdered, together with her husband, by soldiers on 6 February. This is just a small sample of the persecutions suffered by communists and grass-roots fighters in general in Colombia. It illustrates just how hypocritical President Uribe was when he spoke of national reconciliation a few weeks ago, during the official reception which you and the few Members present in the House afforded him.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Commissioner, this is now the second major fisheries agreement between the European Union and a third party. The first issue that must be raised about this agreement, which is of such huge scope, is that there appears to be an unacceptable degree of confusion between what is a fisheries agreement and what is development aid for a region which, although part of a Member State of the European Union, has decided not to be a part of the Union. We have nothing against such development aid and in fact I feel it may be totally justified, but I fail to understand why this development agreement should be disguised as a fisheries agreement. This is a fisheries agreement which reflects and lays claim to the principle of relative stability based on historical catches, but one in which the historical facts are ignored! Portugal will soon be celebrating 500 years of fishing in Newfoundland. Fishing in Greenland is actually a little more recent, and does not date back 500 years. It would, therefore, be difficult to say that any fishing tradition is older than that of Portugal in the seas of Greenland. To say that Portugal has no place in this fisheries agreement is something that we could never accept and which is completely out of touch with the reality of the situation. We can therefore not accept this interpretation of the principle of relative stability.

Political group: PSE
Mr President, there can be no doubt that Europe was in need of an employment strategy in 1997 even though the economic cycle was at a high and it was possible to argue that the market itself would provide for our needs. In the light of the present situation, however, it is even more necessary to make every effort to improve this strategy, particularly as we face up to a war situation and its aftermath. The Commission’s communication and reform must therefore be more than welcome. Let us hope that the second half of the decade that began in 1997 will actually surpass the first. I must begin by echoing what other Members have said. I do not know whether to start by commenting on Mr Mann’s report or on the amendments to it. Further to the statements made by the rapporteur and by Mr Pronk, I find I am bound to state strong opposition to all the amendments. Mr Mann’s report does indeed contain a number of positive ideas. These enjoyed broad support in committee. Unfortunately, the amendments amount to a strong reaction against the most sensible and balanced ideas of the European strategy for ideological reasons. I should like to focus on the objectives and point out that there can be no valid strategy if the objectives are scaled down. As the Commissioner stated, the Lisbon objectives are crystal clear. There is no doubt that the objectives for the coming five years are more jobs, better job quality and better social inclusion. Mr Mann, more jobs is not synonymous with full employment. It is not acceptable to maintain that it was over-ambitious to hope to attain the rates of employment set at Lisbon. That is backtracking. Similarly, better quality is not synonymous with lower taxation, nor is more social inclusion synonymous with fewer fiscal demands. Public resources will be needed to launch proactive policies and to ensure those in danger of being excluded from the labour market are drawn into it. If these amendments are adopted, I shall therefore be obliged to vote against your report, Mr Mann, along with many other Members in my delegation.

Political group: PSE
Although somewhat belatedly, the Commission has presented its programme for the Community framework strategy on gender equality (2001­2005), which differs strikingly from previous programmes and, specifically, from the fourth action programme, which finishes at the end of this year. In line with the proposal that has been presented, the aim of the change in methodology is to increase access and opportunities for non-governmental organisations to actively participate and contribute to the project. If this is going to be possible, we must encourage this effective participation not just at Community level, but also in the Member States. As the rapporteur states, it is important that the Commission considers the fact that a prerequisite of any genuine democracy is that all its citizens – men and women alike – should participate and be represented in equal measure in economic life, in decision-making forums, in social and cultural life and in civil society. The Commission must nevertheless bear in mind that no work on gender equality will have a lasting effect unless women’s rights are improved, specifically in everyday practices in all spheres of activity.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, Commissioner, what exactly is the role of public schools? How far does it extend and in what does it consist? In his report, Mr Graça Moura deals very well with these questions. He considers the extent to which culture should be taught in schools and also at how far this should be financed and supported. These issues are, of course, mutually dependent. I think it is very important to teach culture in schools if we want young people to be aware of and confident about their identity, and capable of becoming active European citizens. We need to work on this and introduce young people to cultural exchange as early as possible. We also need to learn how to teach young people about conflict resolution, as this is something that we would expect schools to include in their lessons on culture and is a prerequisite for achieving the goals set in Lisbon which have been mentioned many times already today. We cannot ignore the fact that European culture and cultural history form the foundation of the common economic area and that we therefore need to invest much more in education than we are presently doing. The EU average for public expenditure on schools is 4.94% of GDP. Although in Sweden expenditure is 7% and in Austria 5.75%, these figures are both declining. It just cannot be right that in many countries, less is now being spent on education instead of more. I wonder what the culture ministers and government officials are thinking when they lend their support to the goals set in Lisbon and at the same time reduce the means for implementing them. This is wrong and needs to be put right. We must, therefore, continue to point out that cuts in the field of education – even in the arts – lead to very serious deficiencies. After all, if creativity is not taught and not given any room to develop, how can young people learn to deal with the constant changes that will be demanded of them in their careers and personal lives? The first step should be to increase investment in art, culture and knowledge, not reduce it. Instead of merely preserving our much-praised cultural diversity, we need to promote it and allow it to enjoy a successful future.

Political group: PSE