Mr President, I feel I must comment on the report by Mr Bösch on the protection of the Communities’ financial interests and the fight against fraud. The report has a coherence of its own, it has some qualities, and a fair evaluation has already been made of it this evening in this debate. In this document, however, the chapter on ‘Strengthening the criminal law dimension’ – from paragraph 58 to paragraph 65 – interferes, as has already been pointed out, with the institution of the European Prosecutor, on which the Committee on Legal Affairs – which I have the honour to chair – gave an unfavourable opinion and then it found points of compromise with the Theato report, which we must look into more carefully. This is certainly solid ground that we should occupy, but, I repeat, we must find a balance. This proposal, which in some way also interferes with the provision to be discussed at the end of March during the Brussels mini-session, does not even, I think, rationalise the legislative system. The legislative simplification we are talking about is a proposal that, in practice, rather puts the cart before the horse, and we are forced to table some amendments to it. In effect, the proposal again creates a European Prosecutor with competence to follow up judgments and crimes that harm the Community’s financial interests. In truth, it is quite unacceptable to the Committee on Legal Affairs because the legal order of the European Union provides neither competences in matters of criminal procedural law nor a judiciary at all levels of jurisdiction that could ensure a full right to defence. In the absence of such a context, the aggregation of a European Public Prosecutor is illogical and unjustified, and I must emphasise this and also tell the Commissioner, who has rather hastily dismissed the problem. We must think about this carefully, because the creation of such a body is premature, if one considers that the objectives of judicial cooperation – which prevails here – have not been achieved and that it is necessary to harmonise the rules on criminal matters in Member State institutions. One cannot simply attribute criminal law competence to the Court of Justice: the Court of Justice and the Court of First Instance were set up for other purposes and, anyway, it is not necessary to create a European Prosecutor when we just have to strengthen judicial cooperation, taking inspiration from the principle of subsidiarity, which is precisely the criterion on which we must base our action. We must therefore continue to enhance the competences of Eurojust, and to strengthen and coordinate these powers at a European level. The amendments tabled are therefore to clarify matters; all the rest of the report can go ahead. We are very afraid that, with the single exception of Italy, where the judicial order is being remodelled at this very moment, in no other country in Europe do prosecutors enjoy the status and powers that we want to give to the European Prosecutor, which is at the root of the alarm at the level of legal consistency and the European legal area. These are misgivings we are going to voice regarding the European Public Prosecutor, but since the issue has in effect come up surreptitiously in this measure, we must formulate them right now in this Parliament and remedy them through the amendments.

Political group: PPE-DE