GwendalTsang/DEFT09-parquet huggingface dataset:
Mr President, I strongly support Mrs Schierhuber’s report on food aid. Being myself a producer of food under the provisions of the Berlin decisions, which have already been widely discussed in public, I am aware how insane and inconsistent it is to use various methods to cut production in the EU while there is hunger in the world. Nowhere is it written that sections of the world population that live in an environment that has been destroyed by natural disasters or wars must not be allowed to eat. One euro a day is enough for survival and offers a chance for the future. That is feasible, in any case. In this regard, the European Union, the Member States, politicians, industry and science must take responsibility and break down the wall between prosperity and hunger once and for all. How will future generations judge us, I ask myself? By the flood of megamergers that lead to ever larger and more uncontrollable giant undertakings, or by whether we manage to adopt targeted measures in the next ten years to combat poverty by cancelling the debts of developing countries, as an initial but necessary step? The report rightly refers to a whole range of guidelines on fighting poverty. For reasons of time I cannot go into them in detail. But the careful observer will notice that there are different weightings at work here. They are reflected in phrases such as “priority to the least developed countries” when allocating food aid, or “alleviation of poverty and hunger of the most vulnerable groups”. I am glad I am not one of those who have to distinguish on a daily basis between “a bit hungry” or “starving”, as it is currently presented in the media, while regrettably little is being done. The main part of the report correctly makes reference to the fact that its aim, ultimately, should be to make food aid unnecessary. But we cannot do that unless the politicians agree that hunger is not a political weapon and unless the responsible leaders in every area of society all realise that we only have the world on lease from our children. We hold the goods of this earth on trust for our descendants. If we take that approach, then I am convinced we really can combat poverty.

Political group: GUE-NGL
We have naturally voted against the budget for the ECSC, which until the ECSC Treaty expires will continue to rain down subsidies on shareholders in the iron and steel industry. Considerable sums have already been awarded to the bosses in this sector, allowing them to diversify into juicy new sectors, while many workers – whose jobs have been eliminated – are still unemployed. Although this draft envisages devoting a certain amount to social assistance, no precise figures are given, while the minimum guarantee should be full salary up to retirement age for all workers affected by future redundancies.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, now we have vignettes dotted all over Europe and tolls in some other countries, would you agree with me that the euro-vignette system is not a very good single market system. The local haulier in Denmark or in the UK will get his full money's worth 365 days a year, but the foreign haulier from another Member State entering that country – maybe for one or two days or ten days or even 100 days – will not. He is paying over the odds for his vignette unless there is some special dispensation on a per diem basis. Would it not be better now that we have arrived at this stage to think of maybe having a mutual recognition system, so that a vignette in one country is recognised in other countries, giving a real euro-vignette system works? The Commission should consider coming forward with proposals in order to provide for a common system throughout Europe. I would like to turn now to my friend Mr McCartin. I agree that Irish trucks have a special case. They are compelled by geography to pass through the UK just as British trucks are compelled to pass through the Netherlands, Belgium and France to get around the European Union. The best thing the UK could do to help the Irish and to help the Scottish is to improve the very inferior British motorway system on which we depend to get to our markets. Yes, the Stranraer-Carlisle road is an absolute disgrace. But it is also difficult getting round Birmingham, getting around London, getting to the Channel Tunnel and to the channel ports. The best thing the British could do with this extra money is to improve our system in the hope of improving UK-Irish friendship and relations.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, although I voted for the van Veltzen report, I feel that it is a communication on electronic communications that actually communicates very little. I have read it with great care and it appears to be written in genuine ‘Brussels Spout’ for the officialese is extremely difficult to understand. While we are on the subject, I would like to inform you that my mother, who is 85 years old, is still walking round Rome without a mobile phone, which is one of the issues covered by this resolution. In addition to regulating the market, the European Union must facilitate access to these forms of communication for the elderly and the less well-off, but especially for elderly people who live on their own. Even mobile phones and progress can serve to take away some of the loneliness from the lives of elderly people. I hope that this will happen.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, yesterday we had a short debate in this House about a very serious matter: asking the Commission to respond in a debate to allegations concerning its Budgets DG. Unfortunately, it transpires that in that debate Mr Watson, the leader of the , factually misled the House and thereby influenced the House by indicating that the Director-General of the Commission's internal audit service, Mr Muis, was attending last night's meeting of the Committee on Budgetary Control to discuss this matter and therefore no debate was needed. Mr Muis did not attend last night. In fact it is only because of pressure applied at last night's meeting by the Group and the Group that he could be attending a meeting next week. Would Mr Watson like to tell us whether he deliberately misled the House, or is this just another example of British Liberal Democrats' inability to call failing Commissioners to account?

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, speaking as a Swedish Conservative, I welcome the Irish Presidency. It is a new European Union that, in six months’ time, you will hand over to the next country to hold the Presidency. With enlargement occurring during your Presidency, the EU will increase in importance and its words will count for more. Ireland has great confidence in the work for peace. You took the initiative, helped find a solution to the protracted internal conflict in Ireland and helped normalise the situation there. In spite of what was said at the last EU-Russia summit, I now appeal to you and the Irish Presidency to make use of the confidence you enjoy and to exploit the European Union’s growing importance by taking the initiative to promote a genuine peace dialogue between the parties involved in the war in Chechnya with a view to bringing the atrocities to an end. The war in Chechnya is a focus for the spread of terrorism. It is an abomination for both Russia and Europe, and the war may have far-reaching consequences for peace in our part of the world. Mr President-in-Office of the Council, what you can bring about in terms of peace and freedom in Europe will be greeted with endless gratitude on the part of the peoples of the European Union.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, I want to congratulate the rapporteur on his report and thank him for his cooperation. Completing the internal market for financial services and affording consumers a high level of protection is a Community priority. Signing a home loan agreement is often the most important and the biggest financial obligation a consumer takes on in his working life. We must therefore welcome the fact that a voluntary agreement has been reached at European level between banking and consumer associations on the duty to provide precontractual information. That the code of conduct and the register of home loan providers to be kept by the Commission will also be made available on the Internet is also a positive move. In this connection, in order to improve the comparability of consumer information, a precise definition of a common effective annual interest rate for home loans should be included in the European Standardised Information Sheet; it should be calculated in the same way throughout the Community and be consistent with the consumer protection directive. The information sheet should be designed to include all the data needed to check how the loan is calculated. This means, in particular, the manner in which advance and deferred interest is calculated. That is one of the most important consumer policy concerns in this sector. It is also desirable for Parliament to be included in talks about voluntary agreements in future so that absolute transparency can be guaranteed in drawing up the code of conduct. I hope that this example of a voluntary agreement between market participants and consumer associations will prove successful so that it can be extended to other areas of financial services. This will be a major contribution to the swift creation of the internal market in financial services. But since the consumer side has relatively few resources available, concrete measures must be taken if the voluntary agreement is not kept. Otherwise, the instrument of the voluntary agreement – a very good instrument in itself – might prove to be inexpedient because in the end the agreement is only kept by those who cause no problems anyway. That alone would not be enough and would be of no benefit.

Political group: PSE
We have today voted in favour of the present resolution on EU space policy, just as we previously supported the own-initiative report on the Commission’s Green Paper on European space policy on 9 October 2003 and the report on Europe and space on 17 January 2002. We would however emphasise that the EU’s commitment to the area of space policy should be based upon the agreement between the EC and the European Space Agency (ESA) from 2003 and be limited to the competence the EU now has in the area of space research. We reject an increased EU competence planned to be included in the treaty for establishing a European Constitution. European industrial cooperation in the area of space should mainly be conducted on an intergovernmental basis in accordance with the Convention for the establishment of a European Space Agency.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, Commissioner, the problem of giving preferential treatment to exports from Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip has now been with us for nearly 30 years and has been the subject of regular oral and written questions and debates in the European Parliament. Most recently, in a debate in November 2003 we reaffirmed that a solution finally needed to be found in order to bring Israel's repeated violations of international law to an end. Because of its practice of labelling products from the occupied territories as ‘Made in Israel’, Israel is not only violating the provisions on the territorial scope of the agreement, notably Article 83, the rules on origin and the provisions on cooperation and mutual assistance between administrative authorities in customs matters, but in doing so it is continuing to display its total contempt for international agreements and for international law. The problem is, however, now more pressing than ever before. The European Union is planning to include Israel in the preferential treatment system of pan-European accumulation, which in this case means making corresponding changes to the EC-Israel Association Agreement. If that were to happen without the illegal application of the rules on origin for settlement products being corrected, it would imply de facto acceptance of such illegal application. The European Union would accordingly be permanently depriving itself of the right finally to insist on legal application of the rules for preferential treatment of exports. The preferential treatment of export products from the occupied territories is, however, not only illegal and in breach of international law, it also means that the Member States continue to be faced with the thorny problem of controls and of achieving some degree of uniform treatment. Although the Commission has attempted to find a remedy, the problem has so far not been solved at all. The Commission has quite rightly informed the Israeli authorities that measures must be taken promptly to halt this illegal practice. Before there can be any further talk about amending the EC-Israel Association Agreement, I would like to call upon the Commission, as a matter of urgency, to resolve this situation before the end of its term of office. This is a very important issue, Commissioner, because it needs to go hand in hand with the amendment of the Association Agreement. The Commission should consult Parliament on this and thus prevent a situation arising, through inaction and a lack of political will, in which illegality is de facto legalised.

Political group: PSE
Madam President, on behalf of the Budgetary Control Committee, I would also like to congratulate the two rapporteurs, who, I know, have done an immense amount of work on their reports. Also the Chairman of the Committee on Budgets, Terry Wynn, for the way he expedited the votes in some highly-charged discussions recently. It is good to get all the work through so rapidly, and I thank him for the way he did that. My committee was mainly concerned with four areas. The first was OLAF, Europe's anti-fraud office. I believe that we have sorted out the problem all the parties in this House had in finding a suitable wording for an amendment about OLAF's funding for the coming year. But we still have concerns about the dialogue between the Commission and OLAF in the budget process. Realistically, I am particularly worried that it poses questions about OLAF's independence; it is part of the Commission in this process and we can amend its budget in that way. The second area was export refunds, something on which Mr Mulder, the previous speaker, is an expert, as is Mr Casaca from the Socialist benches, and a subject I know very little about. I understand that they are relatively happy with the outcome of the amendments they tabled in this field. Thirdly, we were interested in the protection of the euro against counterfeiting, concerned about the valuation of the euro because so much could have been counterfeited. Perhaps we should have been more worried about the bizarre comments by the President of the Commission and tabled an amendment about that. Fourthly and more importantly, we were very concerned about the reform agenda within the Commission and that is why I draw the attention of Members across all the parties to the amendments to the Färm Report, especially in relation to Commission reform. The Commission's former chief accountant has drawn our attention to a number of concerns about the computer systems and how to ensure that our taxpayers' money, our national governments' money, is being spent correctly if the computer systems used do not support each other or provide proper figures. No doubt we shall come back to this in future debates, but those were the main concerns raised by the Budgetary Control Committee.

Political group: PPE-DE
Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, today we are discussing the European Community's programme of action in the field of public health for 2001-2006. As we will, I think, probably end up going into the conciliation procedure, the programme will probably not become effective before early 2002 and its term will be delayed accordingly. The European Commission had allocated EUR 300 million for all the European Union's health projects over five years. I feel provoked by the way the Council of Ministers has again cut this amount and is willing to authorise only EUR 280 million. This programme set itself the extensive goals of continuing the eight existing action programmes, and there are additional tasks, considered to be urgent, especially in the area of information and, as Mr Trakatellis has already mentioned, in that of the challenges posed by international terrorism, whose scale we can as yet scarcely grasp. That being so, I cannot do other than give my full, whole-hearted support to Parliament's demand for EUR 380 million; indeed, I consider that the very least that the European Community must make available. We must not be amenable to compromise on this, and the Council must not be left under any misapprehension about this. The common position on the other areas, however, is in my view a great improvement on what the Commission originally submitted and on the documents produced by the first reading in Parliament. The great majority of the amendments that have now been resubmitted, and to which the Environment Committee has agreed, I do not see as an improvement in absolutely every respect. Despite the difficulties I have with them, I would like to express my thanks to Mr Trakatellis for the work he has done and, in particular, for his efforts at achieving a broad consensus in Parliament. I must say, though, that further and continuing education is certainly a good start across national boundaries, but I have great difficulty with training in healthcare, medicine, and so on, becoming a matter for the European Community. I see it as a matter for the Member States. Some Members have expressed doubt about everything having to be done at a European level. Coming as I do from a large Member State, I have seen only that the centralised allocation of tasks does not necessarily represent an improvement, but that individuals must really be helped where they actually are, and that, I believe, is done better by the Member States.

Political group: PPE-DE
I, like many of my colleagues, have heard from blood donation organisations concerned by the possible modifications to existing legislation in this field. Everyone agrees in deploring, quite rightly, the shortage of blood and plasma within the European Union while stressing the fact that under no circumstances should we relax our vigilance regarding the quality of these products, so much so that the European Union’s requirements are half covered by imports! This directive, amended by Parliament, modifies, integrates and completes the legislation that currently governs quality and safety standards in Europe for the collection, testing, processing, storage and distribution of human blood and blood components. It is about adopting stricter requirements regarding the admissibility of donors and practical screening of them, as well as putting in place a quality system at Community level in blood transfusion establishments. This would all be completed by an equivalent testing and approval system in the Member States. Finally, common standards would be defined for staff training and for the traceability of blood from donor to patient. Of course, these measures will not prevent the Member States from maintaining or establishing stricter protection measures. It is also desirable to reduce the European Union’s dependence on imports of blood or blood components from third countries. In order to do that, information campaigns need to be aimed at potential donors. But under no circumstances should we envisage a system of payment for these products. The European Parliament report rightly stresses the importance of the voluntary nature of blood donation while accepting that the social contribution made by donors and the commendable nature of the donations that they make should be highlighted. As a blood donor myself and a supporter of the cause of blood donation, I therefore voted in favour of this report.

Political group: PSE
Mr President, I rise to speak about the vote on the Chechen resolution. During the debate and also during the efforts to agree on a compromise amendment, it emerged that there is a large majority who are of the same view as regards policy and substance. It can only be a matter of tactics if, at this stage, having adopted six resolutions already, we say the same thing, or virtually the same thing, once again without any serious debate with the Council and with the Commission. For this reason I would like to make this appeal to Members in the other groups: first of all, let us send the joint delegation to Chechnya. Everyone has agreed to this specific proposal. And then, when the delegation has returned, we can hold a major debate on Chechnya in conjunction with the Council and the Commission, and at the end of that debate ..... (The President cut the speaker off)

Political group: PSE
Mr President, Mr President of the Commission, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, ladies and gentlemen, it has been with much concern that I have followed this debate and the preparation of tomorrow's motions for a resolution. The fact is that two trains are going to collide head-on here, all because we are arguing about who is slightly more, or slightly less, to blame in this matter. I too have my own personal views on the subject, but they will not help us to make any progress. We must not allow our capacity for action to be destroyed now by a dispute about who did what badly three or four weeks ago or six months ago, with this war as the result of it. We should bear in mind the fact that essential elements are at issue here. This is about such questions as how we deal with the victims, and how we secure the region's stability, as well as about Europe's capacity for action in the Middle East and about how we, within the Quartet framework, at last bring about sound solutions. How can we, in this matter, put this failure on Europe's part to good use in order to move the Convention forward, in order to prevent Europe's weakness being the cause of the next such situation, and how do we acquire capacity for action by means of better mechanisms that enable us to unchain the political will that we share? Thirdly, this is about how we handle trans-Atlantic relations in future, about in what ways we can put them on new and more stable foundations. How do we gain acceptance for our knowledge that force is not the appropriate way to create a new world order? In particular, how do we save a multilateral world founded upon compromise and upon mutual respect? Mr Poettering, the chairman of my group, made reference to Richard Perle. I do not consider it acceptable for the United States to oblige others to accept its unilateral approach. The United States cannot decide, alone and on the basis of its own national interests, what is right in this world and what is not. That approach, which Mr Perle advocates, for example in an article in today's ‘Berliner Zeitung’, is quite simply unacceptable, for it means that we Europeans have no part whatever in any decisions affecting our vital interests; it means that we are unable to defend our interests, and also prevents us from making any contribution to world peace.

Political group: PPE-DE