Mr President, I should like to express my satisfaction. When we were talking this afternoon and I would have had to begin my speech with the phrase, 'Mr President, absent friends,' because altogether five colleagues were present, Mr Posselt said that if there were no other speakers there from his group apart from him, he would take over all of the Group's speaking time. This would have meant that we would have had to listen to Mr Posselt for a whole fifteen minutes. Imagine that! (Laughter) Now this cup has passed from us and we can turn to the issue addressed by Mr Deprez. Mr Posselt, burden-sharing, which you talked about – one of your favourite subjects – has nothing to do with what we are discussing today, although I do concede that we need to talk about burden-sharing. Allow me first of all to say to the Council that we are dealing with an initiative of the French Government, and recently in the Committee on Citizens’ Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs we have seen individual Member States taking initiatives time and again, and we have then seen that the Member States sometimes happen to be mistaken about their choice of legal basis. For once I will dare to take up something which Mr Posselt said. There is no strategic plan, particularly in the Council. That is why the Council would be better advised to adopt Commissioner Vitorino's strategic plan, which is actually available, instead of blocking most of his ideas. I say this as a point of principle to the Member States and the Council itself. My second point is, why is there no strategic plan? There is no strategic plan for one simple reason. Policy in the European Union as far as freedom of movement is concerned, to the extent that it is pursued by the individual governments of the Member States, is characterised – not in all of the Member States but in the vast majority of them – by a defensive attitude, because in principle most governments in the European Union have as their premise the restriction of freedom of movement and not the granting of freedom of movement, which, incidentally, is defined as one of the four fundamental freedoms in the Treaty establishing the European Community. We are dealing with a deficient strategic plan because we talk about the free movement of services, capital and goods, and from cattle to uranium they can move around freely in Europe. It is only people who are subject to restrictions in the European Union. They are subjected to these restrictions because of a defence mechanism. When Mr Posselt talks about freedom of movement, he mainly means people from the southern hemisphere or asylum seekers. But I am talking, say, about an American professor who accepts a chair at a German university, receives a residence permit for the Federal Republic of Germany and who, when he wishes to give a guest lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris has to apply for a visa, which he is possibly still waiting for because the French or German authorities are not making progress on it. This is because of the diverse and – for the lack of a strategic plan – very heterogeneous administrative provisions in the Member States. I am talking about the engineer who is sent from a third-country to the EU by a firm which has offices in various different locations. He is subjected to the same bureaucratic obstacle, which incidentally ought not to exist at all in a free market and in a free economy. That is why, in connection with Mr Deprez's excellent report, I call on you, when you are debating the freedom of movement and its regulation, not only always to employ a defence mechanism against those whom we supposedly or really do not want here, but finally to realise firstly that freedom of movement is a human right and secondly that it makes economic sense in the European Union. (Applause)

Political group: PSE