GwendalTsang/DEFT09-parquet huggingface dataset:
Mr President, I want to thank the Commission for a sound report. I also want to thank Mr Hughes for emphasising the importance of focusing upon implementation of the legislation. Danish employers often maintain that, unlike their opposite numbers in many other countries, they have to comply with the regulations governing the working environment. To be frank, I am tired of having to listen to this remark without being able in all honesty to contradict it. I should like to be able to repudiate such assertions in the future. That is why it is important for us to obtain more focus on the practical implementation of working environment legislation so that a good and safe working environment really is created at all workplaces in the EU. That being said, we must also give careful consideration to the type of regulation with which we can best make the working environment safe. Legislation is not always the correct route to go down. Sometimes, improvements are better achieved through training, the sharing of experiences and the development of the social dialogue. A good example is the combating of stress and harassment as problems that can only be solved through better cooperation in the individual workplace. That is why I also think that the combating of stress and harassment is a matter for the two sides of industry.

Political group: ELDR
Mr President, I am very sorry but we did announce this action six weeks ago – it has not exactly appeared out of the blue. We have given everyone, including the Presidents, the opportunity to change the agenda if this was considered necessary. Nobody acted upon this. I have not heard of any action to change the agenda, even on the part of the Members who are now complaining. This action, the quorum action, will continue, not only today, but every Friday in Strasbourg, until we have achieved our goal. One of the options is a full Chamber, because one thing that creates the bad image which Mr Bourlanges is talking about is people signing up here and leaving without doing their work. I have also done my homework and I do not want to mention any names, but we will be able to do this in future. We will challenge the quorum for each item on the agenda today. This will cause some irritation. It seems more sensible, therefore, to move all votes for today. We then do not need to continue with this and we can carry on with the debates and ask the Commissioner important questions.

Political group: ELDR
Madam President, most of the African countries that have adopted the NEPAD initiative are ACP countries. This offers the Commission the opportunity to support the NEPAD initiative on the basis of partnership through its cooperation with the ACP. It also offers the European Parliament the opportunity, through the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly, to engage in regular dialogue with the relevant countries about their needs and, indeed, the successes achieved. The new parliamentary committees established by the ACP Assembly offer an excellent forum for this process, enabling problems to be addressed on the basis of critical solidarity. Through their initiative, the NEPAD countries have undoubtedly laid the foundation stone for successful development based on individual responsibility. The task now is to establish a sound basis for fruitful cooperation and create a pan-African house in which every individual finds a home worthy of human dignity. Achieving peace in crisis regions is a basic prerequisite for improving living conditions in large parts of Africa. In order to achieve long-term successes, especially in combating poverty, lasting political stability is essential. This can only be achieved on a reliable basis if those who bear political responsibility secure the support of civil society. That means that there must be active, democratic and pluralist participation by the key groups from civil society: the non-government organisations as well as the political bodies and associations, the trade unions as well as employers’ organisations, and the churches as well as cultural associations and education bodies, to cite just a few examples. There is a particular need for women’s equal participation in designing projects and strategies for development, for they are the key figures who organise daily life, and they are often responsible for ensuring their families’ survival as well. (Applause)

Political group: PSE
I note your remarks with interest, Commissioner, and am delighted to hear that the Commission takes this issue seriously, but your role as I see it seems to be confined to reminding Member States, requesting strong action and then requesting to be informed. With respect, do you feel that is satisfactory or do you feel that the public will find that satisfactory, because these are problems that are recurring? Since I tabled this question, literally in the last couple of weeks, we have had an example in the UK of Germany once again breaking the rules by sending no less than its 13th consignment of meat containing banned spinal cord to the UK. Has the Commission no powers to do anything more than request or remind? If it does not, should it not have such powers? How much longer will it go on requesting and reminding before some action is taken by somebody?

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, I should first like to recall the kind reference Mr MacCormick made to my intervention in the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market. Mr MacCormick stated – it is, in fact, true – that I had said that the principle of subsidiarity was not a legal principle but rather a political principle. Having studied the report with great care, I have come to the conclusion that it is not even a political principle: it is a theological principle. Mr MacCormick, himself, has just pointed out that the principle was expressed by a pope, and it is clear that it is impregnated with theological considerations. I should like to recall that in the seventeenth century a great Dutch lawyer, Hugo Groot, better known as Grotius, one of the founders of international law, warned theologians to stay out of legal matters with that famous phrase, ‘Silete, theologi, in munere alieno.’ At these moments I should like to express my sympathy, my admiration and my pity for the Commission for having to live with this kind of principle. The second paragraph of Article 5 of the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community is utterly unintelligible. This definition is a circular definition, not a legal definition. It states that ‘In areas which do not fall within its exclusive competence, the Community shall take action, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, only if and insofar as the objectives of the proposed action cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States and can therefore, by reason of the scale or effects of the proposed action, be better achieved by the Community.’ Nobody can understand that. Neither can anybody understand the Protocol annexed to the Treaty of Amsterdam to define subsidiarity, nor Declaration No 30. The poor Commission has made a very commendable effort with the documents ‘Better Lawmaking 1998’ and ‘Better Lawmaking 1999’, in which it tries to be tolerant with this nonsense approved by the governments in the Treaty on European Union and the added Protocol. The report by the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market did not gain much enthusiasm from its Members. The proof is that, of the 17 Members on the Committee, 8 voted in favour and 9 abstained. In other words there were more abstentions than votes in favour. The reason why there was so much abstention is that we Socialist Members on the Committee – and some other Members – were expressing our scepticism regarding the overvaluing of the subsidiarity concept in the report. The subsidiarity concept as put forward in the report by the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market is a concept which has been exalted to heavenly heights, and therefore as a theological principle it lies beyond the scope of the Community. We have submitted 12 amendments to the report by the Committee on Legal Affairs. We also support Amendment No 13 by the Group of the European Liberal, Democrat and Reform Party. We hope the House can accept our amendments, and if so we shall vote in favour. Otherwise we shall be obliged to vote against.

Political group: PSE
Mr President, with regard to this proposal, please allow me to remind the House that, in my capacity as President of the European Parliament, in 1991, I had the honour of presenting the Sakharov Prize, in the absence of Mrs Aung San Suu Kyi, to her husband, a British citizen who has since died. She has continued to fight for the same cause since 1991. I believe that, rather than hold a topical and urgent debate, we should make an appeal and pay homage to the perseverance of Mrs Aung San Suu Kyi, and also support her just cause. (Applause)

Political group: PSE
Mr President, our hope is that the European Union, through the Council, the Commission and Parliament, will play a leading role at the Johannesburg World Summit, which is to assess the progress made in implementing Agenda 21, considering that sustainable development and combating poverty are indisputably two priority objectives. As the leading donor of aid, the European Community must take this opportunity to play its rightful guiding role on the international stage – in the absence of the United States – contributing along with the other international institutions to the success of this event. However, its success will depend largely on achievable objectives being set. The recent undertaking to increase development aid will certainly be an important signal for the summit, but it is essential to establish a precise calendar and achievable deadlines without delay, together with an action plan which is realistic as well as ambitious. It will be crucial, for instance, to proceed along the path of debt cancellation, with due regard for human rights and the principles of good government, encouraging actions such as the adoption by the poor countries of a digitalised computerised complimentary accounting model which will make their accounts transparent and reassure the European taxpayer. The FAO Summit which opened in Rome yesterday in witness to the renewed commitment towards and interest in the problems affecting the southern hemisphere paints a discouraging picture, an on-going holocaust: someone dies every four seconds. In 2030, when there will be 8 billion people, it will make a difference whether we have turned words into actions.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, firstly I wish to thank the budget rapporteurs, Mr Färm and Mr Stenmarck, who have done some excellent work and aided the Committee on Budgets in its task. European Union budgetary policy is overshadowed by the unsatisfactory way in which the budget itself has been implemented. As Mr Elles stated in his speech just now, a good EUR 15 billion in budget commitments remained unspent last year, which is an inconceivably huge amount of money. The Commission has suggested the blame lies with the Member States. We must ask what the Commission intends to do in the area of legislation to eliminate this defect in the system. I would similarly like to ask the Council what it intends to do to simplify the implementation of the Structural Funds, pre-accession aid and other long-term programmes, in order to avoid the build-up of such enormous outstanding sums in the future, and, indeed, reduce them. The payment appropriations in next year’s budget stand at just 1.01% of GNP, which is to say EUR 5.9 billion below the financial perspectives. Such meagre sums will not help to reduce the arrears: they will, instead, pile up when the eastward enlargement of the EU has taken place and a lot of other problems lie ahead. Our group supports preparations for enlargement to the east. Next year is the last in which they can be carried out properly. For this reason, the administrative process must be reformed and made more flexible, so that human resources may be deployed more swiftly and appropriately than is the case at present. We support the reform of the Commission, but at the same time we insist on greater clarification in the areas of personal accountability and job descriptions. Moreover, we believe it is important that administrative accountability is also reflected in greater efficiency in such areas as making payments.

Political group: ELDR
Recent events in Kosovo have completed the ethnic cleansing, with the expulsion of the remaining Serbs and gypsies and the seizure of their property. Kosovo's separation from Serbia and the creation of an independent state are being promoted, as pursued by the autonomist organisations of Albanian Kosovars from the beginning, by safeguarding the purity of the Albanian-speaking population. The abettor of and main accessory to this crime against hundreds of thousands of Serbs and gypsies is ΝΑΤΟ, together with the ΕU, which agreed with the intervention and the bombings. The international NATO force set up in Kosovo in order to apply Security Council Resolution 1441, instead of disarming the criminal gangs of the KLA, as it should have done, proclaimed them the Kosovo Protection Corps. The current situation in Kosovo and the tragedy of Yugoslavia in general highlight the extent of the crime committed during the 1990s against the Yugoslavian people and the hypocrisy of the proclamations about protecting human rights from the elected government of President Milosevic made by the invaders when they intervened, preventing it from maintaining order and protecting the inhabitants of Kosovo (of all nationalities) against the action of the KLA. We MEPs of the Communist Party of Greece condemn those responsible for this tragedy and express our solidarity with the fight of the Yugoslav people to expel the invaders.

Political group: GUE-NGL
I would like to address Commissioner Patten and, in particular, ask him and everyone else to note point 7 of the resolution on Belarus. In this point, the European Parliament “calls on the Russian government and President Putin to support, within the political union between Russia and Belarus, a democratic multi-party system and pluralistic development in Belarus”. There is a way to influence Belarus via Russia. The political union which exists between these two states should be exploited to the full by the European Union. We have great faith in Commissioner Patten and would like him, in all contexts, to bear this in mind within the framework of the Union. Let me finally say that, in the parliamentary elections in Belarus in October 2000, a quarter of the candidates refused to stand. This shows what kind of regime we are dealing with.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, Commissioner de Palacio, a great deal has been said and, frankly, I would like to ask all the Members a question. We are talking as if, by adopting the compromise text before us, we are running the risk of plunging from paradise to purgatory, if not even to hell, where port services are concerned. Frankly, without the directive that we are about to vote on, there would be nothing stopping the individual Member States – as has been the case thus far – from adopting national legislative measures to open up the market in port services without any legal framework. I am one of those that have fought hard and I remain convinced that authorisation should have been made compulsory. We did not succeed in obtaining this, but we do have a directive that refers to subsidiarity, to what the Member States could have done, however, and that lays down reference criteria for authorisation which fully protect social, security and environment rules. Of course, this is true if an individual State wants to make authorisation compulsory. Without the directive, however, the Wild West would have been a lot wilder. We all know what the initial proposal was and how it was worked on. We all know the limits that were set for self-handling, the provisions that we abolished, those which provided for a type of Wild West without any regulations for new ports, for new sections of ports or for port sections not open to commercial services. These are the reasons why, for example, all the workers’ unions in my country, Italy – CGL, CISL, UIL – are asking us to adopt the compromise text. We are not going from paradise to purgatory. As regards what individual States could have done, I have the feeling that we have not yet reached paradise, but that we have probably climbed up from hell to purgatory.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, last year Parliament adopted a new version of our Rules of Procedure. Rule 63a(2) of the amended text states: ‘When the committee responsible amends the financial endowment of the act it is considering, it shall request the opinion of the committee responsible for budgetary issues’. While working on this report, the Committee on Budgets was consulted, but at an early stage before the budget amounts had been finally agreed upon. We managed to reach agreement with the Council and with the Commission about an increase in the budget early in January. Ideally, the Committee on Budgets should have been consulted again at a later stage and I am sorry this did not take place. To remedy the situation so as to comply with the Rules of Procedure, I am proposing an oral amendment both to the legislative text and to the resolution. I have of course discussed the amendment with the chair of the Committee on Budgets, Terry Wynn, and he agrees. Thus, a new sentence should be added to the text in Article 10 and Amendment 42, reading: ‘The annual allocation is subject to agreement of the budget authority on the appropriate means of financing under the financial perspective or through the use of the instruments provided by the Interinstitutional Agreement of 6 May 1999’. (The President established that there were no objections to the oral amendment) Before the vote on the legislative resolution:

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, I should like to refer to the recent crisis in Sri Lanka. Mr Cushnahan cogently pointed out that, at a time where it is now possible, after 23 years of civil war, to bring peace to the country, the President declared a state of emergency once the proposals for peace had been put forward by the rebel Tamil Tiger groups. You, Mr President, Mr Poettering and other Members of this House have met the Prime Minister, who as we speak is with Mr Bush in Washington. Parliament ought to be recalled back in Colombo. There is no justification for the prorogation of Parliament, nor for the declaration of a state of emergency, nor for sending troops out onto the streets. The European Parliament might well ask that democracy, the rule of law, parliament and government be reinstituted in Sri Lanka. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, it is high time that we adopted a universal moratorium on the death penalty, that true administrative murder, as Albert Camus called it. This is the purpose of our resolution directed at the General Assembly of the United Nations. Like my colleague, I would like to devote a few words to the urgency with which we must intervene to save Moumia Abou Jamal. Moumia is the black American journalist who was sentenced to death in 1982 after a police set-up and a rigged trial. The Supreme Court has just rejected his appeal. Having spent 17 years on death row, Moumia is now at the mercy of an execution order which the Governor of Pennsylvania can legally sign at any time. At a time when an American study has revealed racial disparity in the application of the death penalty in Philadelphia, the American Government should be noble enough to make a stand against this flagrant violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The shock that this produced in public opinion and the resulting powerful international mobilisation, in which this Parliament took full part, already prevented the implementation of the first execution order, signed on 2 June 1995. Today the threat is serious. It is urgent. The person who is known as the voice of the voiceless and the peacemaker is in danger. Any stand, demonstration or resolution will help to prevent the irreversible, and may prevent that voice from being silenced.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Despite the efforts of the rapporteur and most of the members of the Committee on Industry, External Trade, Research and Energy, there is no guarantee that there will be no discrimination against countries and regions whose business structure does not have the economic ability to take part in programmes aiming at the rapid transfer of knowledge in technological innovation, even though there may be scientific resources. Thus the efforts to ensure cohesion enshrined in the Treaty will not be enough to combat the loss of competitiveness that this will entail. The assumption behind the aims of the Lisbon strategy was full employment and exclusion, and not the opposite. Without being able to share in knowledge and take part in programmes, the less favoured regions will be left a long way from economic and social convergence.

Political group: PSE
Madam President, I should only like to comment on this point very briefly. Firstly, the Commission proposal was flawed, but what is even more important, Commissioner, is the fact that elections have been held in the meantime, and the Commission should also take note of this. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, I welcome the European Union initiative in January to break the current WTO deadlock on developing countries’ access to affordable medicines, particularly those countries which do not have the manufacturing capacity to make generic medicines locally. Just last month, Commissioner Lamy proposed a pragmatic solution which, in his view, is workable, sustainable and legally secure, because it complies with both the Doha mandate and the compromise text of 16 December 2002 that was discussed within the WTO. The EU initiative covers the most comprehensive possible list of major infectious diseases but is not restrictive, which was the main problem with the negotiations in 2002. Commissioner Lamy's list includes: yellow fever, plague, cholera, meningitis, dengue, influenza, hepatitis, polio, typhoid fever, typhus and measles. These are all horrendous diseases that have been virtually eradicated in the West, yet millions die unnecessarily in the Third World every year. The Lamy strategy would save lives, and pharmaceutical companies will not be losing revenue because the people in these countries are too poor to buy the medication as it stands. The debilitating effect of these diseases affects families, communities and economies throughout the developing world. This EU initiative should help to improve the standard of living and public health in some, if not all, of the developing world. However, it is essential that a mechanism is constructed to deal with the other public health issues and potential outbreaks, and not just the diseases listed in the compromise deal. The list proposed by Commissioner Lamy is not restrictive – WTO members could ask for World Health Organisation guidance for any other serious public health problems which may arise in the future or are not covered by the list as it stands. This gives the EU proposal some flexibility to respond to unforeseen outbreaks. The response will be based on World Health Organisation expertise in the field. The compromise proposal, which is more humane that the US approach, should allay US concerns that patent laws could be breached and weakened. At the same time, it provides sufficient flexibility to deal with specific disease-related crises, should they occur. This debate will hopefully send a strong message of support for the Lamy proposal, as the WTO General Council simultaneously discusses the subject. It is important to help the developing world to eradicate these diseases without depriving the pharmaceutical industry of the funding it needs for further research in this area.

Political group: PPE-DE