GwendalTsang/DEFT09-parquet huggingface dataset:
Mr President, I would begin by emphasising some of the remarks made in this Chamber today regarding our concern about EU accounting. That concern is more widespread than I can recall on any previous occasion. Looking at Annex 3 of the Communication from the Commission, I am particularly concerned to see that the Prodi Commission is claiming great success in this area. Its commitment to achieve a broad programme of internal reform includes agreeing a new financial regulation for the management of Community funds. However, there is nothing new about the Eurostat crisis or the background to it, while the Court of Auditors has been unable to sign off the accounts for nine successive years Let us not say that Parliament is suddenly completely in the clear over this. Parliament has, notwithstanding the approach taken by the Court of Auditors, passed those accounts year-in year-out, so there is no doubt whatsoever that the Commission has been led to the view that these were not matters of sufficiently high concern to Parliament. If that has changed I welcome it. Why do I welcome it? Because at this moment EU citizens regard the Commission as synonymous with negatives as regards fraud, maladministration and shoddy accounting. I very much regret that and take the view that the European Union's image should be improved. We look to the Commission to address that issue. How can it do this? Very simply by addressing the concerns that have been raised, by not disregarding those concerns and by taking action in relation to the position of the whistleblowers who have drawn them to public attention. There are currently three such persons who have been suspended from their duties. I call on the Commissioner to take action to ensure that those people who have drawn attention to the scandals relating to EU accounting, and whose current suspension is completely misunderstood by the people of Europe, are restored to the role of clearing up the EU's accounts.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, I would first of all like to congratulate Mr Rasmussen and Mr Haarder on the excellent programme they have presented. It sounds very good. I think that you will receive a great deal of support from Parliament. I have two questions which I hope will be answered. The first question concerns openness in the Council. I have always been committed to this openness, and you know that I have been one of the key players bringing about the recent regulation concerning access to documents, as a result of which we have at least obtained public access. However, I am somewhat dissatisfied with this openness in the Council as it is currently being organised. As I understand it, the Council is public at the beginning and at the end of the meetings and it confines itself to codecision legislation. My question is: how exactly will this be implemented? Is it not possible to throw open the entire session, from beginning to end, in the case of codecision, and why should it be confined to the codecision procedure? Why should debates on legislation which falls within the remit of the national Member States not take place in public too? My second question concerns accession. There are four countries that are creating great difficulty when it comes to accession because they want the structural funds and the agricultural policy to be reformed first. There is such a movement in the Netherlands, among others. I would ask Mr Rasmussen whether he would be prepared to have a heart-to-heart with our Liberal friends in the Netherlands – because they are the main people involved – and ask their leader, Mr Zalm, whether he would take his foot off the accelerator, so that the Netherlands can soon be a loyal participant in this enlargement. I would indeed be embarrassed if the Netherlands were to be one of the countries putting a spanner in the works.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, as many speakers have already said, the intentions behind this report are extremely commendable, particularly the aim of making it possible for the citizens to have a say in the process of establishing environmental rules. This point was discussed during the March plenary and it was already clear then that attitudes towards the methodologies and towards the influence of this participation too vary from North to South, so to speak. Indeed, the northern countries have a different attitude towards this type of involvement, towards the idea of this type of participation from the countries of central and southern Europe. The rapporteur, clearly inspired by the way things work in her country, which is possibly democratically more developed, more advanced than others – proposes participation that is too peremptory, too authoritarian, participation that could ultimately slow down, if not block or paralyse certain decision-making processes, upon which there will never be total convergence between the direct democratic base and what is known as the authority, that is the administration appointed to deal with these issues. There you are: this authority must also take into clear consideration all the demands and comments of those who have to build, sell and create tourist, sporting and cultural concerns – in short, daily activities – in the environment. Considering that this second debate contains points and issues which involve legality and access to levels of justice, including in the event of appeals, the roles and responsibilities must be quite clearly, fairly and unambiguously defined in terms of who the actors should be and how much influence they should have. The Aarhus Convention has been cited: that is all very well – we support it – but it must not be taken as Gospel. It too must allow for a healthy subsidiarity, for customs, for habits, and for the level of directly democratic involvement possible in the various countries. In any case, I congratulate the rapporteur, who has put in an enormous amount of work, but I feel that there should be some adaptation, as I said at the beginning, to the different attitudes.

Political group: PPE-DE
It is hardly surprising, given how the new common agricultural policy is taking shape in the run up to enlargement, that the rural population in the EU, and in Greece in particular, is gripped by anxiety, wondering whether they will be able to continue in their chosen profession, a profession which is so necessary and of such capital importance to the European economy and European society. And why? Because overall subsidies in the agricultural sector will increase by 8% between 2006 and 2013, in the form of a minimal inflation provision. I should like to set this disturbing increase against a number of other post-enlargement increases in the EU, so as to give a more in-depth picture of future developments. Increase in

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, I will try to be precise and quick in expressing my surprise that 8 questions, from various Members, on the same subject, the Western Sahara, have been included on the agenda in the third block of this sitting, and it is therefore impossible for the Commission to answer. I would like the President of Parliament to explain what criteria are used to make such decisions, because, quite simply, I find them very hard to understand.

Political group: PSE
Mr President, Commissioner, this is one of the social areas to which the European Union ought to pay much more attention. Macroeconomic policies, the stability pact and the criteria for nominal convergence have put a brake on modernising social protection which would improve the quality of people’s lives, specifically by means of a significant increase in pensions and pension schemes, particularly of the minimum pensions, and through fighting social exclusion. This situation is particularly serious in countries such as Portugal where the minimum pensions and pension schemes are barely more than half of the minimum national wage which in turn, is the lowest in the whole of Europe. Therefore, while the Commission does not accept the need to amend its macroeconomic policies to create more jobs of quality, with employee rights, which is a fundamental basis for maintaining and modernising a solid, public social protection system, we harbour serious doubts as to its position. Although the Andersson report has gathered some positive proposals, including some that we put forward ourselves, we are still critical of some of the bases for the Commission’s proposal and we still have concerns about the strategy for modernising social protection.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, earlier this week President Prodi announced that one of the Commission’s strategic objectives for the next five years would be to aim for full employment. He acknowledged that 15 million Europeans are currently looking for work and that unemployment is the main source of poverty and social exclusion. What is more, the Portuguese Presidency sees the fight against unemployment as top priority. Yet, all too often these political priorities are invisible in everyday policies. The Commission’s decision to allow the ABB-Alsthom merger to go ahead is a case in point. The new company has announced its intention to initiate a restructuring plan with the aim of making savings. This global restructuring plan could lead to the loss of up to 12 000 jobs. In my region of the UK in particular the employment consequences of this merger have been severe as a result of ABB-Alsthom having announced that it was cutting 270 jobs in Britain with 95 jobs being lost in Stafford and 112 in Rugby. The company’s failure to inform the works council about the proposals for the merger is particularly worrying. It is especially important in the case of large international companies where decisions are taken far from the employee. Point 17 of the Community Charter of Fundamental Social Rights of Workers stresses the need for consultation, adding that this shall apply especially in companies having establishments in two or more Member States. I do not think it is simply a matter of a Community charter. EU legislation on this issue could not be clearer. The Commission would do well in this sort of situation to make its decisions not simply on the basis of whether a merger will distort competition but also on the basis of the social and economic consequences. We need more joined-up policy making on these issues. What we also need urgently is an impact assessment study on the effect of merger in every situation. This is the only way of respecting Article 127 of the Treaty. I welcome the statement made by Commissioner Liikanen, but I also look for the support of this Parliament to ensure that the legislation which we have passed on workers’ rights is implemented rigorously and to ensure that impact assessments on the workforce for proposed mergers are undertaken as a matter of course.

Political group: PSE
Mr President, the Group could not support Mrs Karamanou’s report on child pornography. We strongly condemn child pornography. We consider this to be a very severe and very serious crime. For this reason we consider that the proposals submitted by the Commission are better than the report submitted by the Committee on Citizens’ Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs. It is important that legislation defines child pornography as distinctly as possible. Definitions must not be allowed to become so broad as to make police work and the work of authorities more difficult. If a parent or guardian admits serious abuse of a child, their own child or someone else’s child, they must be treated as the criminals they are and not afforded special treatment in any way. If there is no obligation to report knowledge of actual crime in this respect in Member States, we hope that the Commission will encourage the implementation of such legislation. However, we do not wish to encourage moral panic by encouraging citizens to report anyone without relevant suspicions. Finally, we turn to the proposal submitted by the Commission and the committee on age limits. In accordance with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, a person is to be seen as a child until he or she has reached the age of 18. Whatever the age of the child, vulnerability, the degree of abuse and the nature of abuse must be the guiding factors when setting penalties – irrespective of age.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, I simply wish to express our enormous sadness at the news we have just received concerning a horrendous accident on the Spanish roads, in which a lorry has collided with a school bus transporting Catalan school children, with an initial toll of 20 dead and 30 injured, some of whom are very seriously injured.

Political group: Verts-ALE
The Commissioner actually answered my question in the second part of his answer. As a long-time passionate lover of chocolate for more years than I care to remember, I am sure the Commissioner will agree that, if for sixty years people have been eating a product called 'chocolate', they are entitled to continue to eat the product called 'chocolate'. I am very glad that we finally put this directive to bed in the last session.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, transparency and openness do not appear in a good light in the European Union. In the eyes of the citizens, the European Union is a cumbersome bureaucracy that spends its time cooking up all manner of regulations behind closed doors. As a parliamentarian, I can confirm the accuracy of this impression. The Council of Ministers, in particular, is a sealed fortress. And the present legislative proposal from the Commission is no cause for celebration either. Fortunately, this Commission proposal has been heavily adapted by the various parliamentary committees, due in part to the contribution of a number of liberal draftsmen of opinions that have just spoken. The guiding principle must be that all documents are accessible, subject to certain exceptions. That is the will of this Parliament. All in all, the Group feels that the proposal has been substantially improved on, but that there is still room for improvement nonetheless. I would point out that the arrangements pertaining to the registration of documents are too complex, the grounds for exceptions could be formulated better, and that non-European EU citizens have a right to openness too. The stipulations concerning the duty of the Commission and the Council to provide Parliament with information, have no place in this legislative proposal. The doctrine of political responsibility must not be confused with the citizens’ rights to openness. All in all, I call upon the Social Democrat and Conservative groups, and, of course, the others too, to support our amendments. Mr President, a word about the position of the European Commission, because I have already talked about the Council. My group and I have our doubts about the European Commission. According to reports, this regulation on public access has rarely been discussed in the college, and has been regarded by it up until now as a predominantly official matter. I am keen to hear what the Commissioner in attendance today thinks about this. If it were to be the case then it is a miscalculation because this is about the credibility and reliability of the European Union in the eyes of the citizens. I call upon the Commission to give its full cooperation in delivering a sound regulation based on the principle of public access subject to certain exceptions.

Political group: ELDR
We are not in favour of new subsidies for pig feed and are therefore voting against the report.

Political group: PSE
Mr President, on behalf of my group, the European Parliamentary Labour Party, I should like to say that the vote today reflects our wish to advance beyond the moratorium and establish genuine traceability. Consumers want to know the origins of what they eat and drink, where this can be established and tested. We need effective proposals to establish the lowest thresholds which can be measured and better definition of what can be properly described as GM free, rather than the ambiguous non-GM. We voted for the approvable threshold of 0.5%, above which the product must be GM labelled. But below that it cannot be guaranteed GM free. We need to create a climate in which labelling is an encouragement to move further to develop real GM-free areas of cultivation and production and not the pretence that we have delivered in this proposal.

Political group: PSE
Mr President, I have the floor for one minute. As you are the vice-president responsible for reforming Parliament's work, I shall try and give you an example of what one can sensibly say in one minute. All the groups are agreed. A famous Bavarian cabaret artist once said after visiting the Bavarian regional parliament, that now he knew what parliamentarianism was: ‘Everything has already been said, but not yet by everybody’. Which is why I do not intend to repeat what all the previous speakers have rightly and quite correctly said. All I wish to say is that I endorse the statements made by the previous speakers. They are right, it is an outrage that Mrs Sana and Mrs Zana and Mrs Suu Kyi cannot come and collect their prizes from us. That they are still being kept in unlawful detention, including by a country with aspirations to membership of the European Union, is unacceptable. Thank you for listening.

Political group: PSE
Mr President, I would like to tell you briefly that I belong to a generation which was fortunate not to live through the massacre of Algerians in Paris in 1961, not to experience, on 9 November 1938, Kristallnacht or the start of Jewish persecution in various European countries and fortunate, above, all to see the end of apartheid in South Africa. If, at every stage along the way, there are people who rose up and said, “Never again”, it is quite simply because they are convinced that there is nothing worse than physical harm inflicted on individuals. This founding principle of Europe is today being challenged, indeed, by the application of the death penalty in a considerable number of places throughout the world. China, the self-styled democratic Republic of the Congo, the United States and Iran have the sad record of coming at the top of the list of the countries which apply the death sentence. According to Amnesty International, there are 3,500 prisoners waiting for execution in the United States, where 68 prisoners were executed last year. In these countries, the right of life or death over prisoners is all the more intolerable in the light of the ridiculously limited budgets allocated to crime prevention policies and social matters. I prefer to think that, as Victor Hugo said, to close one prison, it is enough to open one more school. There is absolutely no doubt that the seventeen years that Mumia Abu-Jamal has just spent rotting on death row following a travesty of justice are linked to the fact that he is black, to his fight against institutional racism, to the freedom of thought which this journalist practised by having the courage to denounce the corruption prevailing in the ranks of the Philadelphia police. In the same way, Iran, which executed 66 people last year, would have us believe that the dozens of students arrested and the 13 Jews, were spies. The mobilisation of international opinion, as we have seen, prevented the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal, scheduled for 2 December. But, for the time being, there has only been a stay of execution. We must now seek to have the order of execution revoked definitively. We must widen and intensify our pressure on these countries and hit them where it hurts. It is important that European businesses should refuse to invest in the states of the United States or anywhere else in the world where the death penalty continues to be applied. The Member States of the European Union must refuse to extradite any person to a country where it is known that their death sentence is automatically programmed as soon as they set foot there. Demanding the immediate and unconditional abolition of capital punishment throughout the entire world today does not just mean promoting human dignity but also validating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Mr President, I belong to a generation which thinks that conventions against torture and discrimination should not be signed just for the fun of it.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, my speaking time is limited, but I nonetheless want to address a couple of important issues. There has definitely been a breakthrough this year in the area of aid, on which I have been working. We have reached an agreement with the Commission both on how the reporting is to take place and on the direction our assistance is to take in the future. I would thank the Commission for the constructive spirit in which our discussions have been conducted. Parliament’s scrutiny and control of aid money will substantially increase. The conditions are now much better than they previously were for bringing order and method into an activity which is unfortunately often characterised by anything but those qualities. The fact that the Commission has accepted as a benchmark that a third of the aid must be used as social assistance also definitely represents progress. The agreement guarantees greater focus upon programmes and activities of special importance in combating poverty. I also wish, of course, to thank Mr Costa Neves for the way in which he has taken care of the work. His approach to a very difficult job has been characterised by openness, friendliness and efficiency.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, this matter concerns the agenda in general – I do not know if it affects Monday. As you are aware, the Prestige, failing to live up to its name, spilt several tonnes of oil off the Spanish coast, which not only created an oil slick more than 200 kilometres long, but is also a source of great environmental concern and great economic concern for the families affected, which number over 5 000. Therefore, Mr President, as I understand that Parliament must be sensitive to our citizens’ concerns, I would ask you to include in our agenda a Commission statement, followed by a debate, so that we can examine the circumstances in which this incident took place, the causes, the measures that the European Union needs to take in order to prevent a recurrence and possible terms for European Union solidarity. Mr President, I do not know whether this can be done on Monday or on Thursday, due to the Commission statement on climate change, but I would like to establish it clearly now, so that if the rest of the political groups agree, we can include it in our agenda. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE