GwendalTsang/DEFT09-parquet huggingface dataset:
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I should like to expressly welcome the Commission’s proposal for reforming the market organisation for sheep and goat meat. The previous speakers have already given all the reasons why we so much welcome this proposal. I would also like to thank our rapporteur most sincerely for his work. I believe the revision of the premiums is one of the most important points. The introduction of a fixed rate premium is a major step forward. But I would like to stress that the figure proposed by the Commission is much too small. This premium must also be an incentive for sheep and goat farmers and that means EUR 30 and no less. The premium must also be the same for farmers regardless of whether they produce ewes or milking ewes. A distinction between the two cannot really be justified. I also believe that the EUR 9 supplementary premium for ewes and she-goats is particularly justified under the more difficult conditions in the less-favoured areas. Beef and veal and sheep meat prices generally follow the same trends, which means there is no justification for treating the two sectors differently as regards the premium. On the contrary, there is a deficit in sheep meat in Austria and in many other countries of Europe. If we fail to create reasonable conditions and security for this sector, we shall drive sheep and goat farmers into other areas, such as beef and veal, or they will go out of production altogether. Such a policy would be ill-advised. Finally, I would like to say that sheep and goat farming should not be supported only in areas that have no alternative, but also in those where sheep and goat farming is traditional. I therefore hope, Mr President, that the Commission and Council will follow these sensible proposals from the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development.

Political group: PPE-DE
Thank you, Commissioner, for your reply. As we make a framework decision in the EU which means that EU citizens can be extradited and taken to court for crimes in all Member States, we must also guarantee the Rule of Law. This was also clear in the reply, which pleases me greatly. This lies at the heart of our union, and we have declared this in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. Citizens must be aware of their rights. I listened with great interest to what the Commissioner said about time spent on remand. It is clear that there are various reasons for different lengths of time on remand, but it is still important that citizens know what times apply and that it is possible to have a decision on remand time reviewed. I therefore wonder whether the right to a review of arrests could be a consideration in the issue of remand times. I also wonder whether there may be a need for some form of EU function to guarantee the Rule of Law which I seek and on which the Commission will clearly be drawing up proposals.

Political group: PSE
Madam President, I would just like to bring this paragraph into line with the paragraph we adopted last week, and therefore propose, once again, that the term 'Intergovernmental Conference' be replaced with the term 'reform'. (Parliament agreed to take into consideration the oral amendment) - Oral amendments to paragraph 40

Political group: Verts-ALE
Madam President, I request that this is not taken as a topical and urgent motion. The matter is potentially a very serious one, involving perhaps a breach of Article 10 of the Treaties, and I believe it requires more serious consideration than can be given to a topical and urgent motion on a Thursday afternoon. This matter has been drawn to the attention of the Committee on Citizens' Rights and Freedoms, Justice and Home Affairs, which I have the honour to chair. We have received the opinion of the Director of the Monitoring Centre on the matter, we have asked our budget rapporteur to investigate more widely the question of the Austrian government's attitude to the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia. We need to know the full facts regarding the resignation of Mr Pelinka, the Austrian member of the Centre's Executive Board. It may be that we need to refer the matter to the Group of Three Wise Persons charged with investigating the situation in Austria. But a topical and urgent motion would shed more heat than light on the matter, and seems to me to be an inappropriate vehicle. Therefore I would appeal to Members to vote against this request. (Parliament gave its assent) The other two requests therefore lapse, and there are no further requests for amendments to the agenda. (The order of business was adopted thus amended)

Political group: ELDR
Madam President, I would like to be clear that if we have agreed that Zimbabwe would be the fifth point then there is no point in voting in any other points because we already have five points on the agenda.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, Commissioner, it is extremely important that we explain to the people of the European Union and of the applicant countries what the European Union stands for. This is a task which the Commission has been all too lax about. During the hearings of the new Commission in September 1999, Romano Prodi said, and I quote: “...the new Commission will be putting much more effort into communicating properly with the citizens of Europe, giving them open access to information”. I should like to have seen the President of the Commission here this evening. For now, one and a half years later, nothing has happened. Almost a year ago, the Commission promised, in its work programme for 2000, to present a strategy, but nothing has happened. This year again, the Commission has promised to do something about the matter, but rumour now has it that, when it comes to this area, there is, if anything, chaos in the organisation of the Commission. Allow me just to point out a couple of the practical problems with the EU’s information policy, or lack of information policy. The information is too centralised, it is all prepared in Brussels and it is not directed at target groups according, for example, to gender, age, geographical considerations and the level of education of population groups. There are also some thoroughly topical and practical problems. The large Europa server on the Internet is updated too slowly and erratically, and bureaucrats can remove information from the Europa server as it suits them. There are too many bureaucratic obstacles to accessing information. EU information is now treated as a branch of the EU’s Offices for Official Publications. Is it reasonable that copies of the Official Journal of the EC which are more than three months old should have to be paid for? The Official Journal should be available free of charge on the Europa server. Too much information is only available in the EU’s main languages. Go, for example, into the Rapid database, where you will see, for example, that even Romano Prodi’s speeches are only available in two or three languages. We have eleven official languages in the EU, and all eleven must be used. The key words where the EU’s information policy is concerned must be decentralisation and coordination, including in exchanges of information between the Commission and Parliament. There must be a determination to make optimum use of the information technology now available. I am very anxious to know how the Commission will get to grips with the task. I assume and hope that, as Mrs Pack also mentioned, the Commission’s offices in the major European cities will be involved and that they will be given tasks and responsibilities, as well as means to address and inform the man or woman in the street. Commissioner, this task has now become a matter of urgency.

Political group: ELDR
Mr President, I would like to correct an apparent slip of the pen by means of an oral amendment. I would point out that only ‘the country of employment principle’ is referred to in the paragraph, when it should read ‘the country of residence or employment principle’ because of course I cannot determine what choice the Commission has to make, it must do that for itself. But I would like to add ‘the country of residence or employment principle’, twice. - Before Amendment No 6

Political group: ELDR
Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, we have heard many resolutions formulated in this debate today, but I think the Commissioner’s contribution has made clear that security can only come about through cooperation, by our getting involved in the structures and forcing the parties involved to work together. In this situation there is absolutely no point in formulating resolutions. After all, that was our experience in Europe, too, when in 1950 we united coal and steel to put an end to a thousand years of warfare between the Germans and the French. In the Middle East today, the equivalent of coal and steel is tourism, water and energy. We must change our policy here and support cooperative projects. Since 1993, we have given massive support – billions of euros – to the Palestinian Authority because we wanted the Oslo peace process to be a success. But if you talk to the peace movement in Israel today, you find that members of parliament who only a few years ago went to prison because they talked to Mr Arafat are now saying they would not talk to him any more. He is not stopping the violence, he is behind all this violence that we again witnessed last night. Such a situation inevitably brought Mr Sharon to power. That is why we need a new starting point for cooperation. For that reason, Commissioner, I would like to disagree slightly with your conclusion that these allocations of EUR 10 million to the Palestinian budget between now and November are a good thing. Lump sum payments of that kind can be made to stabilise a budget, but now we need funds with strings attached, not lump sum payments on such a scale. Secondly, we must not continue to make unconditional payments to multilateral bodies like the United Nations Refugee Relief Agency, UNWRA. I would like to read to you something from a schoolbook used by the UNWRA in Palestinian refugee camps. It says: “The extermination of the Jews was a just and unavoidable evil.” The book praises Adolf Hitler and describes the corrosive power of the Jews in the 1930s. If that kind of thing is being taught to eight and nine year old children, if suicide attacks are praised, if martyrdom is glorified, then the European Union with the values it stands for must say: we will not pay for that under any circumstances. I would therefore ask you to look very carefully at what is being taught in Palestinian schools and in the refugee camps through the UNWRA. Our money should not be used to promote such anti-Semitism and statements of that kind. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE
Much of the power robbed from the national parliaments for the sake of European unification has not ended up with the European Parliament, but with the national governments. That is why the EU’s existence has enhanced the power of Ministers and Secretaries of State. The way in which they reach agreements with each other within the Council cannot be verified by the European Parliament or the national parliaments. If a decision is made which clashes with their national public opinion, they can always say that they themselves wanted things differently, but that it was the neighbours that prevented this from happening. The Ministers of the neighbouring countries come up with the same excuse. This intergovernmental method of decision-making is no longer a guarantee that the diverse wishes that prevail in the Member States are taken into account. I therefore call for an interparliamentary method of decision-making, rather than an intergovernmental one. The European Commission makes proposals, the European Parliament decides on these at first reading and, subsequently, the national parliaments individually debate the applicability of these decisions to their own countries. In this model, the Council no longer fulfils an independent, decision-making role. Unfortunately, the proposals by Mr Napolitano do not go that far yet, but he is right to reinforce the role of the parliaments at the various levels in respect of the governments.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, I would like to raise the same point. For nearly 30 years the enclaved Greek Cypriot communities in the northern part of Cyprus have been denied secondary schooling for their children. The result of this is that once their children reach school age, they have to go to other parts of Cyprus to attend schools. This leads to the break-up of families and is designed purely to drive from their homes the few remaining Greek Cypriots in the northern part of Cyprus, which is currently controlled by Turkish authorities. This is a matter on which the European Court of Human Rights has registered its protest and noted that this is a violation of Article 2. I would call upon the House to appeal to Mr Denktash to reverse his decision not to allow the secondary schools to reopen. For too long families in these enclave communities have been deprived of their human rights and deprived of the right to education. Now that there are increasing signs of reconciliation between Cyprus' two communities, and on the eve of Cyprus' membership of the European Union, this is a very good time to show evidence of that reconciliation by allowing the secondary schools to re-open in the enclaved Greek Cypriot communities.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, Commissioner, I remember how, around the middle of last year, when the merger of the American companies Time Warner and America Online was announced, there were people who described that event as an early beginning of the third millennium as far as its cultural and technological aspects were concerned. At that time, comparisons were made. In the United States, 40% of homes had access to that network of all networks known as the Internet, whilst in the European Union, that figure hardly reached 20%, and that percentage was only surpassed in a few of the Union’s Member States, which were more advanced in terms of technological development. I believe we need to make progress and take more action specifically on that issue. We must not have two types of society, second- and first-class citizens, those who are technologically advanced and those who are technologically backward. We must provide all citizens with access to this new information society. However, as we make more effort in terms of the concentration of companies and of developing the European market, we must take account of the dangers caused by a lack of security in telecommunications. I am thinking of the Echelon affair, which is very much related to this kind of issue. In Europe, we must ensure that there is security, because that is a human right.

Political group: Verts-ALE
Mr President, over the last few years we have seen a completely new development: the conversion of pharmaceutical companies into biotechnology companies, an explosion in the number of companies specialising in the development of genetically modified organisms, a steady increase in the allocation of public and private funds to support research in the field of genetics, the legal race to patent GMO seeds and even to patent the manipulation of the human genome, the truly astonishing speed of mergers and break-ups between biotech companies and even the emergence of new political frontiers and a new debate on ethics, agriculture, public health, the environment, hunger and poverty. In short, biotechnology is bringing about a real revolution in science, economics and politics. A revolution that brings hope but which also involves risks. Therefore, the ‘yes, because I say so’ or ‘no, because I say so’ forms of fundamentalism will get us nowhere. The answer lies in a fair balance between the freedom to conduct research and the need to protect public health and the environment. I feel that this revision of the directive on the deliberate release into the environment of genetically modified organisms respects this balance because, on the one hand, it does not impose restrictions on research or experiments and on the other, it lays down clearer and more restrictive rules on the release of GMOs into the environment, thereby protecting consumers and biodiversity. Nevertheless, the revision of this directive will only be complete when the Commission goes ahead with legislative initiatives that implement, in a way that leaves no room for doubt, the principles that are now being declared on imposing responsibility for the environment and for the labelling and traceability of products containing GMOs.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, Commissioner, the modification of the directive on packaging is going to have enormous repercussions for the various agents, local councils, collection systems, companies producing materials, the food industry and consumers. It is clear that we must set quantitative objectives and that these must be ambitious but, at the same time, they must be achievable. We must not forget the fact that in certain Member States the objectives will be more difficult to achieve for historical reasons relating to lack of infrastructure, low population density or consumer habits. I regret not having been able to reach a full agreement with the rapporteur, but I believe that her work has not been at all easy. In the report which she presented in the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy there were many points on which we were in agreement, but Mrs Corbey wanted to go further and, after having reached a compromise, at the last minute she has introduced modifications in Amendments Nos 26 and 27 which have obliged me not to sign them and to vote against them tomorrow. I understand that in countries such as Germany, Belgium or the Netherlands the collection of waste is cheap and efficient. In these countries there is a uniform distribution of population and no geographical barriers. But it is not logical to impose the same objectives on other Member States which do not have a similar distribution of population. And I am not just talking about my country, Spain, but also Finland, Sweden, France, the United Kingdom and other Member States which are going to have great difficulties fulfilling the objectives agreed in the common position. And this is not a problem of a lack of investment on the part of public administrations. There are 41 million of us living in Spain, half the population of Germany, in an area of 504 000 km2. The population is distributed around the most mountainous rural environment in the whole of the European Community. Can anyone believe that the collection of waste can be carried out on equal terms? We need a realistic, flexible and, above all, applicable directive. It appears that some people want to gear this directive towards their own laws and impose it on the other Member States. This is neither fair, logical nor equitable. I believe that the Council’s common position is pretty balanced. I fully support the dates and the quantitative objectives set in it. My only regret is that there are not equal objectives for all materials and that, as a result of economic interests, we have forgotten that there are problems with the functioning of the internal market, which is the real reason for this Directive. I believe it is very important that we support the various different options for dealing with waste: re-use, recycling and energy recovery. These three options are better than merely depositing waste in dumps. Finally, we must bear in mind that packaging waste represents a relatively small proportion of all waste generated in the Member States, 3% according to you, Commissioner. So let us be flexible. Industry is making great efforts as are the agents involved.

Political group: PPE-DE
I voted for Mr Koukiadis’ report, Mr President, because what it asks and calls for is one of my long-standing dreams, when I manage to dream – which is not very often nowadays, given the approach of 13 June – for I sleep well. Why is that? Because I would genuinely like European law to be genuinely a primary source of law. It appears, for example, that Article 13 of the Treaty of Amsterdam is being breached in Italy. There is discrimination against elderly people and people with disabilities, who are given – or not given – financial support just because they are over, or under, 65 years old. I therefore welcome this report and I look forward to when European law is made a primary source of law.

Political group: PPE-DE
Madam President, I do not wish to reopen the debate, but I had also asked for the floor, to comment on Mr Barón Crespo's motion. You did not call me either. I regret this, but the vote has already been taken and the decision is made so let us leave the matter there.

Political group: PSE
Mr President, first of all on the technical measures. Since 1985 there has been a provision in the technical measures regulation to allow Member States to impose stricter measures for their own fishermen in EU waters. They could not do this for other fishermen, but only for their own. Now the Commission has proposed the removal of this provision in the revised regulation. We have raised this matter in the Committee on Fisheries many times and the Commission says that this provision is redundant, that Article 10 in the new basic regulation allows Member States to enact stricter measures for their vessels. This right is limited to their own waters, at least so the Commission said in January when it more or less forced Sweden to exploit the depleted cod stocks in the Baltic and the North Sea. So, if this provision is removed from the technical measures regulation, as the Commission is proposing, then Member States will not be able to impose stricter measures outside their own waters. I would like to know from the Commission why it considers this undesirable now, after almost twenty years? Does it not fly in the face of wanting to persuade Member States to be more responsible and, if they are more responsible, allow them to be? There is a lot of hypocrisy here. I would like to ask people to support Mr Hudghton's amendments, which would actually bring the regulation back to what he originally wanted. On the Irish Box, it makes no sense whatsoever in an important nursery and spawning area to try and increase the number of vessels that are going in there, to open up the Irish Box. If the Commission is being consistent in wanting to have a more ecological and sustainable approach to fishing, then surely it should not do that. There is also hypocrisy in this Parliament in relation to ICES, because regarding the cod stocks, even the Commission would not go as far as ICES wanted. Therefore some people want to accept the advice of ICES only when it suits. You cannot allow what is going to happen to the Irish Box to go ahead. It completely flies in the face of conservation and sustainable fishing and there is no justification for it. We would like to see our amendment supported tomorrow during the vote.

Political group: Verts-ALE