As Mrs Wallis knows only too well I have not agreed with a number of things that she has said during the time she has been rapporteur for this important report but I would like to put on record my appreciation for the very considerable work and effort she has put into what she has done for this Parliament. As spokesman for the British Conservatives and the Legal Affairs Committee, I want to begin by endorsing the remarks made by Mrs Palacio, chairman of that committee. The process of which this debate is a part is, as has been explained already, a component of the so-called Amsterdamisation of the Brussels Convention. It is an unusual process but one in which Parliament has to give the message from its consultation that the Brussels Convention must not merely be transformed into a regulation it has to be brought up-to-date to meet the needs of the contemporary world. The Convention itself is old: it antedates my own country’s joining the European Economic Community. It goes back to an era before not only the Internet but even before the commercially available personal computer. It is therefore tragic that the Commission and the Council have been so timid in getting to grips with the reality of the modern world for we are in a world which is moving away from that of national jurisdictions into the world of networks. In the world of networks traditional jurisdiction-based disputes-resolution procedures are of no real help to consumers and traders when things go wrong. It is for this reason that the jurisdictional aspects and arguments must be squeezed out of disputes. ADRs which are a form of bona fide privatised law, agreed upon by the parties and legislators, must be the first and the main means of resolving disputes. They cannot merely be the pre-trial steps before a disappointed consumer takes refuge in his own legal system for, if they become that, myriads of SMEs will boycott the Net for business, thereby reducing their own profitability and their contribution to society and the national exchequers. It will seriously reduce Europe’s citizens’ choices, thereby reducing their quality of life and standard of living. I hear my opponents say: there is Lord representing the forces of reaction, flying in the face of the Community’s honourable tradition of consumer protection and arguing at variance with the detailed terms of existing European Community consumer protection legislation. Taking the latter point first, I argue in the way I do because existing legislation no longer meets the consumers’ needs. After all, a later statute succeeds its predecessors and, if the form of protection the consumer is given needs overhauling, earlier legislators cannot and do not stop the draftsmen and their successor legislators. When it is time for change then it is the time for change and that time is now. The world has moved on. We have got to move on with it and nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the debate we have had about the so-called directed website. Such a thing is a contradiction in terms since the Net is a shop window at every terminal link to the network and, to argue in some contrived way, that a site can be directed at some and not others is linguistically facile, commercially nonsensical and technologically illiterate. We have an opportunity tomorrow to vote for the 21st century, its consumers, traders and citizens by voting for the committee’s report or we can look at the future and then turn our back on it and find superficial comfort in the last century by voting for the amendments. We, in my delegation and in this group, shall be voting for the 21st century’s solutions to 21st problems and supporting the committee’s report. ***

Political group: PPE-DE