Mr President, today we are debating the annual report on the area of freedom, security and justice created at the Tampere Summit in October 1999. I think we should in fact call it an area of justice, freedom and security, because justice is the cornerstone of our European Union, which sees itself as a Community of justice. We made two important steps forward in Nice, which we welcome: first, the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which was adopted and should now be made legally binding and, secondly, the reform of the European Court of Justice; these are two of the pièces de résistance of the Nice Treaty. Nonetheless, Europe as a Community of justice still has a long way to go, especially as regards cross-border judicial collaboration in civil and criminal matters and – and I think this is most important – in human and civil rights, precisely because the Charter of Fundamental rights is still not binding. And, of course, being a Community of justice also means that we require not only that candidate countries comply with the acquis communautaire, but that we implement and comply with our own resolutions and legal acts. Hence, our main question to the Council and to the Commission is, what is the current state of play as regards the implementation of the agreements and resolutions which form part of the acquis communautaire, what is the timetable here and why are there still so many delays in this area? The second issue is freedom. Freedom is a product of justice. Freedom is based on human dignity. But, to prevent freedom from being abused, we need security, because without security and without justice, freedom is the law of the strongest. We do not want a law of the strongest, we want a law of the weakest, which is why we need a security policy based on justice. There are considerable deficits in the cross-border fight against crime, in collaboration in judicial matters and in the unification of law. In this sense, I should like to call on the Council to expand Europol without delay, to make some headway at long last with parliamentary control of Europol, to finalise the establishment of the European police academy in coming weeks – here too there have been delays, even if the Commission had positive developments to report yesterday – and to ensure that there are common European border controls. The European Parliament suggested this on my initiative three years ago. I am grateful that a few Member States are now pressing in the Council for uniform border controls on the external borders of the European Union. But we also want to ask the Council in this extremely important debate exactly how it sees its responsibility vis-à-vis the European Parliament. We have begun excellent collaboration with the Commission and with Commissioner Vitorino but we have identified a number of clear deficits as regards cooperation in the area of justice and internal affairs. We are holding today’s debate without a written annual report or any documents on the part of the Council on what has been done and still needs to be done in this crucial political area. The Commission scoreboard here is exemplary. But there is no annual report from the Council on what happened in the year 2000 in this crucial area. I think that Parliament should be properly informed and taken into account and that Parliament needs to be more involved in the crucial area of justice and internal affairs. We can see crucial deficits on the part of the Council here. You cannot build a citizens’ Europe and yet bypass the elected representatives of the people, namely us parliamentarians. Finally, I should like to comment on the sensitive area of asylum law. What we are lacking here – as in justice and internal affairs as a whole – is a strategic approach on the part of the Council. We have a plethora of often contradictory initiatives from the individual states. We have a multitude of individual approaches, but still no strategic approach to a common asylum policy, a common immigration policy or a division of the burden, a division of the numbers between the Member States. We call on the Council to make good these deficits. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE