Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the Commission draft and the accompanying Parliamentary report, which we are debating today, can be described, without qualms, as the European institutions' admission of bankruptcy as regards asylum policy. Mr Vitorino, it is you who bear primary responsibility for the fact that, in the course of three years, your House has failed to produce even one single proposal on the right of asylum on which we might come to a compromise. What is even worse is that your House does not yet, for any practical purposes, separate the three pillars of economic migration, asylum rights and subsidiary protection. That is why your proposals regularly end up in the Council's waste paper basket. The left-wingers in this House, though, also bear their due share of responsibility for the failures to date. Even the Commission is going beyond the harmonisation of minimum standards, yet, as a matter of principle, the left-wingers keep on making the proposals broader. There is nothing, though, to equal the mendacity involved in you delivering great speeches in this House on asylum policy and allowing yourself to be lauded as the defender of refugees' rights, while your own left-wing governments, in Great Britain and Germany for example, boast about their strict policies on asylum. Even Mr Cohn-Bendit argued on French television last week in favour of tighter regulation. Why? Because, at home, you are subject to quite another kind of public scrutiny, and there you have a responsibility to our citizens, whose capacity for assimilating refugees has limits – limits that you consistently disregard here. Tomorrow, then, we will be putting our amendments to a vote by roll call in order to expose your hypocrisy to the public gaze. Let me turn now to the report. There is nothing new about your proposal to expand the definition of ‘refugee’ far beyond what is contained in the Geneva Convention. Hitherto, this has always been rejected by us, by the Council, and even by the minister in Germany's red/green government. If you have your way, people receiving subsidiary protection will be treated in almost the same way as recognised asylum seekers. That, though, is quite nonsensical. In Germany, we have known refugees from civil wars not to apply for asylum, because, as a rule, they want to return to their country once the civil war there has ended. Integration in the host country is not for them, nor do they want it in the least. Anyone who demands compulsory schooling for the children of these refugees must need his state of mind examined. Most of these children speak not a word of the host country's language, and you want to have their status reviewed only after five years instead of after one! I can imagine no situation in which the conditions giving entitlement to subsidiary protection are present five years running. No, different groups need different arrangements, and so the Council is right to call for two different approaches. Why does this directive again concern itself with the reunification of families? After the first flop that you and the Commission produced here, I wonder if you, Commissioner, are working on a new holistic approach? So what is it to be – an integrated approach or rules in every single proposal? I do not doubt that the Council will chuck this proposal in the dustbin as well. You, though, will in future prefer to talk about open coordination, and will thereby conceal the fact that a European asylum system has been a failure, a failure you yourself provoked. Your proposals have a damaging effect on European integration. We reject them and support the amendments tabled by our – and your – chairman, Mr Hernández Mollar. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE