GwendalTsang/DEFT09-parquet huggingface dataset:
This motion for a resolution is in line with the federalist viewpoint of gradually bringing the field of Justice and Home Affairs, opened up by the Treaty of Amsterdam, into the Community sphere. The intention is gradually to remove prerogatives and competences that lie at the very heart of Member State sovereignty. The process was expanded in the Treaty of Nice, adopted in 2000, and gathered pace on the pretext of the so-called ‘fight against terrorism’ following 11 September 2001. This has led to repressive measures being implemented, specifically in conjunction with the US, which undermines freedoms and fundamental rights and guarantees and which the motion neither criticises nor condemns. Despite making some relevant and necessary criticism, the motion basically supports the European Union’s current policies in this field, examples of which include: extending the Schengen Information System, EUROPOL and EUROJUST, gradually ensuring the common management of external borders, a restrictive asylum policy, an immigration policy that criminalises immigrants and which promotes their repatriation, the use of biometric data, the arrest warrant and the European Union’s definition of terrorism. This motion for a resolution even argues the case for the so-called ‘European Constitution’ and its use as a tool for achieving new and dangerous developments.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, Mrs van der Laan recommends that we grant discharge for the 1997 financial year, and we interpret this as an act of good faith towards the new Commission, as previous speakers have already said. This discharge is to be granted pending a commitment from the Commission to undertake sweeping reforms; that is what it says in recital 1 of the motion for a resolution. Anyone, however, who believes that, regardless of the fact that discharge was refused for 1996, the discharge for 1997 will make everything rosy in the garden again, is very much mistaken! As far as I am concerned, the all-important question as to how willing the new Commission actually is to submit itself and its officials to supervision by Parliament and the judiciary, has gone unanswered. Let me give you an example: one of the first issues we were confronted with, as the newly-constituted Committee on Budgetary Control, was the Fléchard case, which involved fraud in connection with the export of butter to the former Soviet Union at the beginning of the ’90s. On 7 January 1994, high-ranking officials in the Commission took the decision to largely waive the penalty which the company concerned was actually due to pay and which amounted to almost EUR 18 million. This was an outright violation of Community regulations in force and the first we knew of it was when an anonymous notice was sent at the end of 1998. Everything I have heard Members of the Prodi Commission say on the subject hitherto boils down to a plea to stop poking around in things that happened long ago and to look to the future instead. The enormity of it all is that a Director-General and a number of Directors who were involved at the time have declared themselves innocent of the fact that, unfortunately, the minutes for the crucial meeting of 7 January 1994 have inexplicably disappeared. It is claimed that there was not just one copy of these minutes, but rather that there were several copies. It is said that whilst each participant received his or her own copy, sadly, none of these can now be found, none of them! Now, more than ever before, we can no longer say “forget it!” This is something that should be on OLAF’s list of cases relating to internal affairs requiring investigation but, as far as I am aware, it still does not feature there. This is also one of those cases that should be referred to the competent judicial authorities since, when all is said and done, allowing documents and minutes to disappear is no trivial offence but is expressly made a punishable offence in Article 241 of the Belgian Criminal Code. All I can say is that we will no doubt take up this theme again during the discharge procedure for 1998.

Political group: PSE
chairman of the Committee on Budgets. – Mr President, I want to concentrate mainly on the revision and just say to those who have been making comments condemning the Commission on the proposal for taking money from 1A: ‘Let us wait and see what the PDB brings forward’ and not write off everything at this time. Ralf Walter made the very pertinent point that agriculture expenditure will actually increase and if money is taken from 1A it will be from surpluses, but let us wait until the PDB comes along. We are working on assumptions when we present this report from Mrs Haug. I am just referring to the Haug report not to Mr Ferber’s. I congratulate the pair of them but in this Haug report we make certain assumptions about the revision, about redeployment in Category 4 and about the needs of Kosovo. However, I need to remind the Council – and at least we have one willing scribe down there if no one else is doing the night shift for the Council to get the message across – that really, if the Commission makes the proposal which we expect them to make, then they are duty bound, because of the interinstitutional agreement, to discuss with Parliament what that revision should be before their first reading. My gut feeling is that there will be no agreement with the Council on getting a revision of the financial perspective. Well, if that is the case, the message needs to go out now loud and clear that we will have the same bumpy ride with the budget this year that we had last year and you will not win. We will be determined to do our best for the Balkans and Kosovo but, at the same time, we will be realistic for those other policies which Parliament considers to be important. The trouble with the Council is that everything revolves around what was agreed at Berlin. We keep being told that Berlin is set in concrete. Well, in the words of Hugh McMahon who was one of my colleagues up to the last Parliament, in a debate on shipbuilding, he once said, ‘We don’t want it set in concrete, we want it set in runny cement’, and I presume that what we want in this day and age is to have the Berlin Agreement in a type of runny cement so at least you can be flexible enough to agree with us that things have to change. I make the point, Mr President, as I did yesterday in the Budgets Committee, in the twelve years of the financial perspective there have been 38 revisions totalling over EUR 7 000 billion of monies that have been involved in those revisions. Kosovo is one of those occasions where the financial perspective is not flexible enough and it needs to be changed and that message has to be got through otherwise there will be problems.

Political group: PSE
Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to thank the rapporteur for his excellent work, which is just as we expected. I think that this regulation and this legal basis will, with the measures that follow, help to improve food safety in the European Union, and will establish the general principles of the new food law. With reference to general food law, I would like to mention, in particular, that this represents a real success in developing the principle of a seamless improvement in the food chain from farmer to consumer. A key aspect of the principles set out here remains the traceability of products. I believe that we have accordingly established two significant new principles and requirements for improving food safety. The centrepiece of the regulation is the creation of the European Food Authority, or, as it is designated in the amendment, the ‘European Food Safety Authority’. I do not want to spend too much time on definitions here. What I consider most important is the fact that the framework conditions have been created for this Authority. The first of these is adequate financial provision. It seems to me that this has not so far been achieved to the extent we might have wished, and the same applies to conditions governing communication between the Authority and the various authorities in the Member States. Appropriate arrangements have not yet been set up in the Member States, and there is still a lot to be done in this regard. As for the openness of the authority, I believe that this House's amendment is certainly correct, but we also have to guarantee that in certain circumstances the Authority can also meet behind closed doors. An important issue, as many others have already said, is the location of the Authority, and if the Council rejects our proposals, it seems to me that it must intend to locate the Authority in such a way that our requirements and conditions cannot be met. We cannot let such a situation prevail, nor can we accept it. The Council must finally give in on this and select a location that will facilitate communication with the Commission, Parliament and the Member States.

Political group: PPE-DE
Madam President, I voted against the Commission proposal because the Commission is using the reform of its financial management, which I also believe to be urgently necessary, as a pretext to weaken the European Parliament’s powers of control. The EC Treaty provides that the Commission shall present the Parliament with all necessary information on request. The Commission is now seeking to make that right to information subject to provisos in the Financial Regulation. For example, in future, the Commission wants to check whether passing information to Parliament would be against the Union’s interests. That creates the absurd situation where the party under scrutiny, the Commission, decides what information to put before the one who is to scrutinise it, Parliament, and what not. That not only weakens Parliament, but it weakens the Commission itself. In future, it will have to listen to the criticism that it has learned nothing from the past and is continuing to escape effective control. - Bouwman report (A5-0348/2001)

Political group: PPE-DE
During today's vote on the Zimmerling Report (A5-0235/2001) I voted against the report and I also urged all my 'Nea Dimokratia' colleagues to do so. It is my strong belief that the approval of this directive will lead to the displacement of the art market to the USA as well as to Switzerland, and to an unfair advantage that all the artists from the United States will have when they try to sell their artistic work in Europe. I also believe that the proposal for national limits lower than the Community ones, as far as 'droit de suite' is concerned, will eventually harm European artists and will boost the profits of the gallery owners and the auction sales companies. For all these reasons, and since I am a European artist, I decided to vote against. - Rothley report (A5-0174/2001)

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, there is no point flogging a dead horse. This is why the disastrous vicious circle of loans, debts and new loans must be broken. The immense repayment costs prevent any form of development. There is hardly any money left for education, health care or for building well-functioning government machinery. Debt relief is therefore a matter of extreme urgency. This should be facilitated in a joint effort involving all creditors, the Union, the States, especially the United States, international institutions and banks. However, a very broad strategy will not get us much further. The debt cancellation programmes must be tailored to the specific circumstances of each individual country. It is essential in this respect to tackle not just the social problems, but also to lay a firm foundation for sustainable economic development. If this fails to materialise, then foreign investments will not be forthcoming either. A prerequisite for relieving debts is sound financial housekeeping within the governments concerned. We should not be naïve about this. We can no longer write out blank cheques. In the past, billions never reached the intended causes. A great deal of money got into the hands of corrupt regimes which allowed Swiss banks to benefit from the large-scale theft of development aid. When will the civilised world finally realise that countries which maintain banking secrecy are accessory to huge crimes at the expense of the poorest population groups. The IMF and the World Bank started an initiative back in 1996 to relieve the debts of the poorest countries. Last summer, the conditions were amended, with good reason. Aid was made conditional upon tangible results. It would be wonderful if the European Union and the Member States were to take a generous stance if the conditions were met. Let us do everything possible to help the poorest countries fight poverty. This can work if the victim is involved in his own rescue.

Political group: ELDR
Mr President, Commissioner, I should like to congratulate my fellow MEP, Mr Parish, on an extremely good report. I want to focus upon the small number of young people going into farming in recent years and, at the same time, the unduly large number of people who are also leaving it, because, if young people do not come into the industry, there will come a time when agriculture no longer exists. I think that the image of farming – due to the many outbreaks of disease, dioxin scandals etc – is, at the moment, one of the really major problems. It puts the whole industry in a negative light and seems unfair to the many farming families who would, of course, get top marks for the way they look after their farms. It is undoubtedly very important that there should be transparency and that people should be made more aware of production methods and of the modern stalls and cowsheds that now exist, as well as being given information about the common agricultural policy and about the ways in which fields and animals are looked after. Efforts must be concentrated on providing support – moral, educational and financial. No one has in recent years questioned the many millions of euros we pump into training lawyers, engineers and doctors. There is a clear parallel with young farmers who, of course, are responsible for the land and the animals we have and, especially, the food we eat.

Political group: ELDR
Mr President, I voted against this report because I do not believe it falls within our competence. Although the report has many good points, it talks about rights. Rights at whose expense? Rights at the expense of the unborn child and also, therefore, at the expense of humanity. Surely humanity cannot be reduced to the level of political wheeling and dealing. Surely, when we build a better world it must be based on some absolute cornerstones. Human life cannot be subject to voting. It cannot be a question of a minority or majority decision. If our solidarity does not extend to that most vulnerable creature, the unborn child, then we in our human family are building the foundations of tomorrow's world on sand soaked by the tears of the unborn child.

Political group: PPE-DE
Madam President, I should like to thank Mr Nicholson for the swiftness with which he has submitted his report. This will enable us to vote tomorrow on a Commission proposal which very much needs to be implemented. I should like, however, to raise a series of questions that have occurred to me regarding Amendments Nos 1 and 2, which ask that the changes in fishing techniques to be adopted under this proposal should be subsidised under the FIFG. Although in principle I have nothing against aid to fishermen, I do think it should be granted within a specific framework and in accordance with unequivocal criteria, and this is the basis of my question: to clarify what these criteria are. The rapporteur invokes Articles 15 and 16 of Regulation (EC) No 2792/1999 in support of his request for aid. I think in any case that only paragraph 2 of Article 16 should be invoked, and I should therefore like the Commissioner to clarify whether the requests in the report would come under the text of the said article. If the measures contained in this proposal can be financed under Article 16(2) of the FIFG, this would mean that any technical measure involving a major restriction in fishing activity could be too. It must be remembered that by definition any technical measure involves some restriction on the activity. I think it is worth making this point clear, because it is obvious that any technical measure means an economic loss for fishermen, either directly or indirectly. If this is the criterion that must be followed, it is also clear that if measures such as those proposed are subsidised, then subsidies will also have to be given to any others deriving from a modification of technical measures which would result in changes in the use of fishing techniques or methods, in other words virtually all the reforms under the technical measures regulation. Commissioner, I should really like you to clarify this point, seeing that Article 16(2) is open to all kinds of interpretations. I should like to know what interpretation the Commission gives to Article 16(2). Thank you, Madam President, and I forgo one minute of my time this evening, which is getting rather long for everyone.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, Mr Duisenberg, ladies and gentlemen, I think that the Radwan report is particularly important, because it cannot be read in isolation from the next item about the euro information campaign. I am glad that 11 of my 12 amendments were accepted in committee. I had three principal aims in mind with those amendments. Firstly, to enhance and underscore the independence of the European Central Bank. To my mind, this independence also implies freedom from instructions, and this is justified because the ECB has a clear remit, which is to maintain price stability. My second aim is to call on the ECB, through this House, to continue to pursue its stability policy so as to ward off the increasing risk of inflation. My third aim is to give a signal to all the applicant countries that membership of EMU is conditional not on political concessions, but on meeting the convergence criteria. So this report is also important as regards the information campaign, as I have already said, because the media’s overemphasis on the euro’s external value, which has a psychological impact on public confidence in the single currency, needs to be countered to a greater extent by the demonstrable success of economic and monetary union, to which everyone must give greater prominence. We must not allow information on the technical changeover to be overshadowed by information about the political objectives and the successes achieved so far. By way of conclusion, I would therefore like to say that the euro, as this report demonstrates, is a project for growth and employment, for a successful single market and for enhancing Europe’s identity. The euro is a project for price stability and lower inflation rates, for increasing competitiveness and improving public finances, so that we finally put a stop to the process of selling out our future for budget policy reasons.

Political group: PPE-DE
Going beyond the proposals made by the Commission, the Lisi report undertakes a much more stringent revision of the Seveso II Directive. Some advances merit special emphasis: the introduction of lower threshold values for explosive substances, the inclusion of new carcinogens or of particular mining operations and the inclusion of the storage of certain substances in the catalogue of potential hazards. The report stresses the need to involve the staff of establishments and to enlist their practical and occupational experience and training in the effort to improve safety. The desire for transparency and public information and for the involvement of local populations in all safety plans is another very strong point of the report. However, in the preparation of safety plans, there is still a lack of real consideration of the establishments’ own health and safety committees. Where work is subcontracted, the report recommends that subcontractors’ staff should be involved and trained, but it does not question the rationale of subcontracting. The fact is, however, that the desire of directors to maximise their companies’ profitability, a desire that is reflected in their heavy reliance on subcontractors, runs counter to the quest for the highest possible level of safety. Nor does the report place enough emphasis on the responsibilities devolving on the boards of the establishments in question. Despite these reservations, I shall be voting in favour of this report for the reasons outlined above.

Political group: GUE-NGL
I should like to start by congratulating the rapporteur, Mr Cushnahan, on his excellent work on such an important matter. I am delighted to see that Commissioner Patten, for whose attitude and efficiency as governor of Hong Kong I have a great deal of respect, is here with us today. I should like to dwell for a moment on two points which I believe are important, as of course are so many others. The first is purely legal. We must, I think, all agree that if, with measures such as those quoted in the Cushnahan report, we touch on the principle of the rule of law which should inform the legal and constitutional framework of Hong Kong, then we question the wider principle of 'one country, two systems' on which developments in Hong Kong have been based. And the second point which I wish to raise concerns the risks threatening the freedom of the press. It is of paramount importance to the proper development of the principle of 'one country, two systems', which constituted a revolution, as it were, in international relations because it introduced a new doctrine, to have, to protect and to respect freedom of the press. Why? Because it is through freedom of the press that observations and proposals are made which aim to keep things within the democratic framework on which we are all agreed.

Political group: PPE-DE
Although it is important to ensure good conditions for animals, the reality of each Member State must be taken into account. In Portugal, where small-scale pig holdings predominate, it is not right to introduce all at once a whole raft of profound changes to holdings, making them economically unviable. The maximalist measures that Parliament has approved do not take into account the reality of a small country like Portugal. Their application would in the short term lead to a concentration of production and the destruction of most of the small and medium-sized holdings, and would aggravate the situation of family farms. The measures are certainly important for the northern countries, but not suited to the situation in the south. Thus, although we continue to support improvements in the conditions and treatment of animals, we voted against this report.

Political group: GUE-NGL