Mr President, Commissioner de Palacio, – both of you fortunately Spanish – on this very important point, the Erika in December 1999 and the Prestige in November 2002 have already been mentioned as two disasters that were followed by all words and no action, though certainly not from the Commission who – as has already been said – did in fact do a great deal. What we deplore is, instead, that there is still no overall legislation on protection of the environment through criminal law and, in fact, the conflict between the Council and the Commission, with the well-known subsequent appeal to the Court of Justice has crushed hopes, at least for us environmentalists. On the other hand, in the specific area of maritime pollution – this has already been said, and there is no need to repeat it – the proposal for a directive is extremely worthy of praise, as was Mr Pex’s work, which made considerable improvements to it. I believe, however, that this directive will only have an impact if there is the political will to enforce it, especially because recent history teaches us that European Union directives are almost always disregarded by Member States. The real issue is the lack of will on the part of Member States to respect these provisions and the fact that, I am sorry to say, immediate corrective action has to be taken today when there have been terrible disasters. The proposed framework decision is merely a complementary decision to the directive. There is an excellent agreement, and it is, therefore, necessary that both are welcomed by Parliament with all the amendments tabled which are, in my view, excellent, although I have some reservations as regards the European Coastguard, since the sketchy proposal for this body gives us some cause for concern. The substance of this directive does, however, go in the right direction although it must be made clear that this will not be enough unless there is an overall framework to protect the environment in general and without which maritime protection will continue to be granted a lower level of protection. We need to return to overall community legislation on the environment as a whole and I believe that the Council should be reasonable and adopt the proposal for a directive on protection of the environment through criminal law, which, I repeat, was blocked by an appeal to the Court of Justice. This would be an excellent step because we would have adequate maritime protection, which would, however, be within the framework of environmental protection that could be equally protected at a criminal level, since there is no doubt that criminal sanctions are most likely to make workers in the sector adapt to provisions. In my view, this directive goes in the right direction and does some justice to all the workers because it will bring many workers under full control that were hitherto excluded. We know very well that international conventions excluded from liability ship-owners and a whole range of people who were, in actual fact, directly and indirectly responsible, and we saw proof of this with the Prestige, where the only one to pay was a poor captain of a Greek vessel who, at least, did everything possible to avoid the disaster, whilst others should be charged regarding the Erika disaster and its repercussions. I therefore agree both with the report on the proposal for a directive and the report on the proposal for a framework decision, and I hope that Parliament will adopt them both.

Political group: GUE-NGL