I welcome very much this opportunity to take stock of progress and achievement in the area of Freedom, Security and Justice in 2002, as we do every year. Strictly, according to the Treaty we are supposed to do so only on Third Pillar matters of criminal law, police and judicial cooperation. That does not make any sense, so we allow ourselves to range a little wider, and bring in asylum and immigration as well. I confess that due to one of those artificial but practical demarcations we have to live with, my vision has not widened to include civil law measures on access to justice. They are dealt with in this House by the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market, and I am representing the Committee on Citizens' Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs. It is not very satisfactory, and our two committees ought to work together on this annual report. However, I am encouraged by the fact that my own committee is very united in its broad critique of progress in Justice and Home Affairs, even though we have robust disagreement on actual policy content. The questions we are putting today to the Council and the Commission reflect three broad strands of concern – coherence, balance and democratic accountability – that we have identified in the almost four years since the provisions of the Amsterdam Treaty came into force, and the three-and-a-half years since the Tampere Summit and the freedom, justice and security roadmap outlined in its conclusions. Our first concern is whether there is sufficient coherence in the work being done; whether the strategies, plans and scoreboards are being followed. We feel that the use by Member States of their right of initiative has been unhelpful to consistent progress through the work programme. If there was real consultation in the Council and a majority view that a proposal was truly needed to fill a gap in the Commission's output, that might be one thing. What we have in practice is a nice little opportunity for individual ministers, not necessarily even speaking coherently for their government, to stage a few press conferences for domestic consumption. While it is understandable that the terrible experiences of 11 September gave a boost to anti-terrorism measures and the European arrest warrant, the deflection from the parallel goals of boosting guarantees of fundamental rights and civil liberties is less understandable. We are only now on the brink of getting proposals for strengthening rights to a fair trial and legal enforcement of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. We are still lacking measures to protect data privacy against snooping on e-mails, telephone calls and Internet usage. There is also an obvious lack of coherence in the area of asylum policy, where there has not been a rapid and coherent achievement of all the elements of a common policy. We still have no agreement on matters like the definition of a refugee or the procedures for deciding asylum claims. Our second concern is the related issue of lack of balance. This can also be illustrated, particularly in the area of asylum and immigration, where there has been much emphasis on the repressive aspects, however necessary, of the fight against illegal immigration but very little on the goals of integration through family reunion and the legal rights of long-term migrants. Our last concern is the absence of sufficient democratic accountability. We welcome the report of Working Group X of the Convention. We support their conclusions, seeking to remove the impediments to the achievement of democratic accountability and coherent decision-making. They call for qualified majority voting to be the rule in the Council and for democratic scrutiny and full partnership with the European Parliament to be reinforced through an extension of the codecision procedure. We very much support that. We also want to see an end to the Third Pillar system for police and judicial cooperation and a much simpler and clearly discernible allocation of competences between EU and national levels. We would also like a political dialogue with national parliaments. We therefore ask the Council and Commission to answer the questions we have put to them today in the light of those concerns, which are shared across the spectrum of the political groups in our committee. Some progress was made, there was some activity in 2002, but the conclusion has to be 'could do better'.

Political group: ELDR