Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, many thanks, first of all, to the rapporteurs, but also to the Commission. You see, Commissioner Vitorino, that I am being very even-handed with praise and blame today. Let me start with victim support. Past decades saw well-known worldwide NGOs concerning themselves time and again with offenders in every corner of the globe, with the conditions under which they were detained and with their rehabilitation into society. Often, unfortunately, their victims were forgotten and left alone. Even today, far from all our Member States guarantee comprehensive victim support, particularly not to nationals of third States. In many States, as little account is taken of victims of offences of negligence as of victims who are unable to prove lasting or grave detriment. To date, only the victim compensation rules in the Scandinavian States – Denmark, Sweden and Finland – can be described as exemplary. Time and again, in my capacity as a member of the Committee on Petitions, I come up against cases in which compensation was either not paid out to victims, or it was at any rate unreasonably delayed, where even EU citizens in other EU States had applied for it. In the past year alone, a dozen petitions from victims of violent crime within the EU have been passed on to us. Admittedly, there has hitherto been no legal basis on which we would have been entitled to intervene. It is to be hoped that this will now change, particularly if the Commission allows its Green Paper to be followed up by definite legal acts. There is one thing we should not do at this juncture. We should not set up another EU fund, as it is intolerable that the Member States should evade their own financial responsibility in this matter. If the USA can manage to lift the financial burden from dependents of the victims of 11 September, wherever in the world and irrespective of their nationality, then it can also be expected of the Member States of the EU within their own territory. Mr Santini's proposal on legal aid is also a significant step towards the creation of this legal area. The regulation on cooperation and enforcement in civil and commercial cases is already in place, as is judicial assistance between the Member States of the European Union in criminal cases. This has enabled us to get quicker and simple cross-border justice for Europe's citizens, which means that time is pressing upon us when it comes to creating a European form of access to legal aid, by which means alone we will contribute to the fair application of existing European regulations to those who would otherwise be unable to take a case to trial. And, Mr Cashman, you are quite deluded if you believe that this can only apply to cross-border trials, for if you were to establish a higher standard for the whole of Europe, your own people would blow up a storm, and if you were to create a lower standard across Europe, you would have to answer the question as to why you were treating the EU's citizens worse than your own. That makes the approximation of laws absolutely necessary, and I do not know any reason why we should not go ahead with it on a Europe-wide basis. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE