GwendalTsang/DEFT09-parquet huggingface dataset:
Mr President, we are dealing with an important issue which, like many other issues, faces scientific uncertainties. What is peculiar about this issue is the erratic nature of the Commission’s proposals. Faced with the difficulties of defining animal welfare in an objective manner, the Commission has been making proposals by trial and error. Having tried to apply the inapplicable rest centres, it is now making the current proposal which is just as extraordinary, in my view. How can we imagine that an extended stop during the journey can benefit animal welfare? Looked at in this way, it seems to me to be extremely simple-minded. We can imagine the effects of such a proposal if applied to ourselves. Allow me to offer this comparison: if on a car journey, just before reaching our destination, we were obliged to stop for a considerable length of time, without getting out of the car, our nerves would naturally suffer considerably. While the Commission's proposal poses serious problems in terms of rigour, we must acknowledge that the draft report, despite the efforts of Mr Maat, represents little more than ‘every man for himself’. Firstly, a distinction is established between animals intended for slaughter and animals intended for fattening. Why should animals intended for slaughter have more right to well-being than those intended for fattening? As far as I am aware, according to the Treaties, all men are equal, and animals as well. It is clear that the draft report guarantees that 40% of Dutch exports of pigs go to their farthest destination: the Spanish market. Alright: 1 400 000 pigs will be able to travel for 30 hours, while the poor pigs intended for slaughter will have the right to a final wish and will not be able to travel for more than nine hours. What a wonderful achievement for the welfare of animals! It is true that, with the nine hours, pigs originating from Poland, for example, will be able to be sacrificed in certain nearby countries, leaving the added value there and not exactly promoting compliance by Polish slaughterhouses with Community legislation. In my opinion, this draft report addresses many issues and not simply animal welfare. We must recognise that nobody transports animals for the fun of it. The transportation of live animals is expensive and complicated, and is only done when necessary. I believe that the essential thing as far as the welfare of animals is concerned is to reduce the total travelling time for all animals.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, Madam Vice-President of the Commission, ladies and gentlemen, following the Erika accident, the profound, and totally legitimate, concern of the European citizens and the urgent need to consolidate the Community legislation in the field of maritime safety became clear. This concern led to the Commission’s proposals and I would therefore now like to congratulate the Commission and its Vice-President, Mrs de Palacio, since we have all witnessed the tenacity with which she has personally dealt with these issues. I also congratulate the rapporteurs on the wonderful work they have done, completing this package of measures. Ladies and gentlemen, during my intervention in the May part-session, I said that we could be relatively satisfied with the way we have responded to the expectations of our citizens, in trying to approve these initiatives as quickly as possible – in inverted commas – by Community standards. The Erika I package and future approval of the Erika II package will make it possible to create a genuine European area of maritime safety and must guarantee an optimum level of protection for the maritime environment and the European coastal regions. Today I simply wish to repeat part of what I said then, since the circumstances have not changed. This Parliament has shown its great interest throughout the negotiation process. We must now continue to work in this direction and promote the measures which are yet to be approved. We must not rest on our laurels and we must call on the Council so that progress can be made on the Erika II package and, in this respect, Commissioner, your role and your tenacity will be very important if we are to try to convince the Council once again, so that we may have the Erika II package more quickly.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr Dell’Alba, in a minute you will see that not all Mr Fatuzzo’s speeches are poetic. This one concerns nuclear power stations. Clearly, through this funding we are protecting the Chernobyl power station – and I voted for the motion – but we must think carefully: should we really close the Bohunice power station in Slovakia – which I visited with the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy last week – and on which thousands of billions have been spent to increase safety, and make its closure a non-negotiable condition for Slovakia’s accession to the European Union? Should we not think more carefully about this?

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, I absolutely agree with what Mr Arvidsson has just said with regard to Turkey. Turkey has improved its human rights situation and its legal praxis in a way that is worthy of our respect. I think it is very unfortunate, however, that it has been suggested that there should be a change of policy. Our message to Ankara should remain the same as it has been the whole time, which is that EU membership is open to all European countries provided that the criteria for accession are satisfied. With enlargement, the Internal Market, which is the EU’s core mechanism, will grow larger, which will improve the EU’s chances of success in the global markets. In the pauses between the celebratory speeches, however, we have to remember that achieving a viable Internal Market required and will require, in the future too, great effort on the part of all concerned. For that very reason, the Copenhagen criteria also include the requirement that there is competitiveness within the Internal Market. I agree with the rapporteur, Mr Brok, that there is still a lot of work ahead of us. Making political decisions is easier than bringing about changes in the economic structure. The timetable for 2004 is a tight one. It is difficult to implement economic structural reforms at times but we have to keep to the commitments that have been made. We have to ensure in particular that the future Member States have the administrative and legal capacity for operating as part of the Internal Market. Our job as politicians is to guarantee that the Internal Market will function successfully after enlargement. This means that the work cannot stop with Copenhagen. Even after accession the new Member States will have to continue with their policies of reform. The internal reforms the applicant countries implement will nevertheless increase the prosperity and stability of their societies in the long term. The European Parliament will also have to monitor the situation and ensure that the present Member States, the Commission and the future Member States each play their part in completing the enlargement process.

Political group: PPE-DE
During the 1990s, the use of cannabis considerably increased in most EU countries. However, users of hard drugs by injection are a more elusive group that is therefore bound to be condemned to social exclusion, as the report indicates. We must respond to this. First of all, it is now essential that we advocate prevention through information channels. In order to do this we need to set aside financial resources and take action by organising campaigns, mainly in schools, in order to raise awareness among young people. We need to inform over and over again in order to prevent current standards from becoming blurred in the eyes of the young people of Europe. Secondly, it is essential that we involve everyone: parents, but also teachers, the police and the justice system, and finally and above all, associations that support drug addicts. That is why we should welcome the recommendation inviting local groups to help drug addicts to opt for a healthier life.

Political group: ELDR
Mr President, Mr Lipietz has written an excellent report which highlights two of the European Investment Bank’s real weaknesses. The first is that the bank has had a terrible information policy, and there has been poor supervision of the bank’s decisions and work. The second is that the bank’s environmental work has, as I see it, been extremely poor. There are numerous examples where the bank has supported projects within the EU and in the candidate countries which have actually been indefensible from an environmental point of view. With regard to the area of environmental impact analysis, it is clear that the World Bank, for example, is better than the European Investment Bank at making analyses public before decisions are taken. We have at least recently encountered a new attitude from the EIB. There has been more talk about dialogue, openness, environmental considerations and change. We hope this will lead to real reform of the bank’s work – which we would of course welcome – and to the Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters being implemented in full at the bank. I would like to say that we support this excellent report and the amendments tabled by the Group of the .

Political group: GUE-NGL
Europe and its citizens are a much-debated topic. Recently, I received a complaint from Dutch citizens in Bellingwolde, a village situated on the Dutch-German border. The complaint was about the windmills which the German Government had installed very near the border, allowing green electricity to flow into Germany, while the Dutch village is landed with the pollution. This is what the Dutch wanted to lodge a complaint about to the European Commission. According to the Commission’s website, any citizen can have recourse to Eurojust, a system which offers help and advice to people with a problem of a legal nature in connection with the application of Community law. On its website, the Commission pledges that a network of legal advisers is on standby in the different Member States to give legal advice free of charge. This is an excellent pledge, but unfortunately, it does not apply to the Netherlands. There is nobody on standby in the Netherlands. In fact, the Commission’s representation in The Hague has been waiting for a legal expert to be appointed for years. Until such time, the Dutch cannot gain any legal advice about complaints, and are sent from pillar to post. Mr President, we urge you to broach this subject with the Commission as a matter of urgency. This is about a practical and specific problem faced by EU citizens who want to uphold their rights. It is unacceptable for a Dutch village that wants to fight the pollution generated by German windmills to have no rights in practice.

Political group: PSE
Mr President, I too have reason to thank Mr Karl-Heinz Florenz. I also found that the Parliamentary delegation very much got its act together during the conciliation and has finished by submitting a very good proposal. Two aspects are of particular importance for me. First of all, we have succeeded in clarifying the fact that, from the end of next year, end-of-life vehicles will have to be properly disposed of throughout the European Union. In other words, it will no longer be possible to dispose of cars illegally or to abandon them somewhere in the woods. Nor will there be the impulse to export them in one way or another to Eastern Europe. Instead, they will have to be properly disposed of on the spot by authorised companies. For me, that is one of the great, fundamental successes of this directive. The second important point for me is no longer the issue of costs and competition. These are problems we argued a bit about and finally solved quite reasonably by means of a compromise which all sides find workable. Instead, the second important point is the fact that, by means of this Directive, we have established that new cars must demonstrate in their type verification and test that they are easy to recycle. In this Directive, we are calling upon the Commission to alter the directive on type licensing so that, in the future, new cars have to be built in such a way that they can easily be recycled. That is the crucial thing. In that way, we are moving away from the end-of-pipe technology whereby we always have to consider what to do with the remains of cars. Instead, we need to bear in mind, right from the time that vehicles are built, that cars, like other products, have to be re-used and disposed of. That is precisely the right way of going about matters, and I am therefore very pleased that we have got the directive up and running in this way.

Political group: PSE
Mr President, the fact that the White Paper on food safety has no intrinsic legislative value does not in any way detract from the dual purpose which it undoubtedly serves. First of all, it embodies the commitment to completely and comprehensively overhaul legislation, to set up an independent Food Safety Agency and to organise inspection better. It also has symbolic meaning. It can and must signal the start of a new beginning. From now on, the policy will be tackled in a coordinated and integrated manner and will embrace the entire food chain. I welcome the fact that rapporteur Bowis, who has done sterling work, has opted for a positive approach to the White Paper. His report does not so much propose amendments as establish emphases. For example, it is right to stress that the food authority should first and foremost concentrate on food safety. Nevertheless, I hope that there will also be room for collating knowledge in the field of linking food patterns to health. After all, policy should not only focus on preventing damage to health, but also on obtaining health benefits. A second justified emphasis is the request for consideration to be given to regional and cultural differences in the food supply and to the role of the SME and the traditional trades in question. I would in this light urge you to recognise the specific value of the SME and traditional trades in the extensive package of legislation. A third emphasis is required which is as yet missing from the report but which we can introduce via Amendment No 12. Both the White Paper and the Bowis report mention communication on the one hand and procedures in emergency situations on the other, but there is no attention to the internal and external crisis communication which is so desperately needed. It can nevertheless – and we have first-hand experience of this in Belgium – be a determining factor in managing the extent of a crisis and in whether consumer confidence in the institutions survives or not. To conclude, let us hope that the Member States might join in the vision shared by Parliament and the Commission, and that, above all, they will assume their responsibility, not only as constituent parts of the Council, but also as a body which must ensure that inspection in the field is carried out efficiently once the European measures have been transposed in national legislation.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, I would like to follow up on the excellent speech by Mr Van Orden and the very interesting point made by the Earl of Stockton in his valedictory speech just now. At its meeting last week, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights failed to publicly criticise Russia and China for their human rights abuses. It rejected resolutions on Chechnya, China and Zimbabwe, but adopted measures on North Korea, Cuba, Belarus and Turkmenistan. This showed that powerful countries can still get away with murder, torture and the silencing of critics just days before news emerged about the discovery in Chechnya of the bodies of nine men who had been extra-judicially executed. Torture and arbitrary detention remain rampant in Chechnya despite Russian Government claims that the situation is normalising. The United States has sponsored a mildly-worded resolution on China that encourages the Chinese Government to make substantive progress in systematic reforms to ensure respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. However, China was victorious in a procedural initiative at the UN with a no-action motion to prevent the resolution from coming to a vote. Over the last ten years, about 8 900 Chinese Christians have been arrested and detained, and religious activity that is not state-controlled is illegal. China is increasingly branding harmless religious groups as dangerous cults. In Zimbabwe, there is a chronic situation of human rights abuses, yet the United Nations is not taking any action. It simply cannot be that countries with poor human rights records use a no-action motion to block discussion of their own human rights practices. The UN Commission's purpose is to publicly air the human rights situation in any country, especially in the case of egregious violators. It is time to put an end to the misuse of procedural mechanisms to keep violations off the table. If the UN continues to be a puppet, we should cease funding its human rights activities.

Political group: PPE-DE
Chairman of the Committee on Citizens’ Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs. – This proposal for a Council Regulation is an important proposal. My committee has worked very hard to prepare Parliament's response to this proposal in time for the deadline set down by the Council and in time for the Council to discuss it on 2 December. If we have time to debate this report this morning, then we must vote at lunch-time. This will enable Parliament to give its response in time for the Council to discuss it. However, if we are not able to have this debate this morning, if there are too many speakers down for the Napolitano report and the Giannakou report, then I would support Mr Pirker's proposal that we not vote on the matter tomorrow. It is too important a matter to be voted on a Friday, even though I personally will be here. I am not sure whether those who, as I understand it, have a problem with the report, such as the French delegation in the Socialist Group, will still be here tomorrow – we might ask them that. However, if it is not to possible to vote on it today, might we ask the services of Parliament whether it would be possible to have the debate this evening and the vote on the Wednesday of the December part-session to allow us to forward the results to the Council by the Thursday; and might we also ask for the assistance of the Commissioner in intervening with the Council on this matter?

Political group: ELDR
In line with the changes to the financial perspective, the 2002 budget will not exceed 1.1% of the Community GNP, which means that we will be able to stipulate a non-growth budget for the coming year. As a matter of fact, the rapporteur has accepted this approach, to the extent that he sets the implementation and the quality of expenditure as major priorities for the coming year. This would relegate to the status of footnote issues such as employment and social issues or the budgetary effects of enlargement and the introduction of the euro. Food safety is mentioned, in the light of the BSE crisis and foot-and-mouth disease, and the report argues for a long-term strategy, but there is no assessment of the costs of these crises to spending on agriculture. Nor are any measures included for compensation to farmers, as we suggested there should be in our proposal to create a special reserve for BSE-related issues, and nor does the report provide for the essential adjustment and setting of upper limits for issues relating to CAP aid. In the meantime, I feel that the rebudgeting of the Structural Funds should be carried out as a matter of urgency, in order to ensure that the sums budgeted for are properly applied. As a matter of fact, I would point out that, in this context, we refused to undermine our post-2001 spending objectives in Agenda 2000. Lastly, I think that it is of particular concern that, in his report, the rapporteur explicitly regrets the fact that decisions on the financial regulations will only be taken by qualified majority from 2007 onwards, ‘forgetting’ the fact that otherwise, the country would then be losing a fundamental instrument – unanimity – for setting the next financial framework, including the part concerned with the Structural Funds and the cohesion fund.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, there are people here who are old enough not to have forgotten the extraordinary and harrowing reports that came out of Cambodia in 1975, with aerial pictures of a deserted capital as the Khmer Rouge, their leaders schooled in the violent tenets of French revolutionary tradition and possessing a mixture of political idealism and mass psychopathology, moved two million people from the city to the countryside to begin a new society in year zero under the leadership of the 'great' Pol Pot. The sick were dragged from the hospitals or left to die. What followed was to shock the world. The human rights abuses of Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Chile, Angola are dwarfed by the sheer scale of the atrocities that took place under the Khmer Rouge. The deliberate deaths of between one and two million people constituted a real genocide. Perhaps, to be accurate, we should call it a sectocide for the intention was not to wipe out a race but an entire class, with victims selected on the basis of whether they were educated, whether their hands showed signs of manual work, or even whether they wore spectacles. It is not surprising therefore that following Pol Pot's death and the defeat of the Khmer Rouge, there should be a need for some kind of national catharsis through the application of justice and a calling to account of those responsible. Personally I hope that the prosecutions will not be restricted to the top 20 leaders but be extended to those who daily brutalised and executed their victims. If the Cambodian people want these trials to proceed, and the political situation is sufficiently stable to permit them, then it is only natural that the international community, through the UN, should wish to support them in that aim. We should beware, however, of imposing justice on other states, especially if such proceedings might unravel a political truce or accommodation that has brought peace or stability to the region and promises a better future. Amnesties are sometimes necessary if unpalatable. In Cambodia, though, it looks as though the people and government are ready to take the risk of overturning previous amnesties in order to secure justice. If that proves to be the case we should wish them well in this venture.

Political group: PPE-DE