GwendalTsang/DEFT09-parquet huggingface dataset:
Madam President, when Mr Mann’s report was discussed by the committee, many amendments were subject to major debate. There was disagreement over one area in particular, namely the conditions under which small businesses operate, together with their role in employment policy. Two different approaches were thus pitted against each other. Advocates of the one view wanted to make life easier for small businesses by means of tax relief, lower wage costs, less red tape, what are known as mini-jobs and such services as cannot be provided without government aid and public subsidies, for example household services. The other approach was quite different. The representatives of this approach wanted to put their faith in small businesses with good business ideas, skilled management, possibilities of growth and ambitions to grow and to employ more people. We are concerned, then, with small businesses that are also strong or are able to become so and that can manage to pay good wages and ordinary taxes, provide their employees with good working conditions and maintain good union relations. What we have here, then, are two different approaches, but not varieties of right- or left-wing policies, for I know that many people in industry prefer good, strong small businesses and that it is precisely to these businesses that they wish to provide capital, opportunities for growth and support in terms of knowledge. It is also precisely this route that my group too wishes to go down. In actual fact, we of course have too many small businesses in Europe. By far the largest number of small businesses is to be found in those countries and regions which are weakest economically and in which unemployment is very high. We have a large number of businesses that can scarcely support one family. We have a large number of businesses that start up with the aid of state subsidies and that immediately disappear once the periods of subsidy have come to an end. In brief, we have a situation in which statistics show that, of ten new businesses, there is perhaps only one, or possibly two, that will survive the first three or four years. We must put our faith in quality. We could unite all the political groups in this Parliament around a progressive policy in this area, a policy that would take our overarching objectives and the Lisbon strategy’s objectives seriously, that is to say ‘good jobs for all’. Such a policy would require that, in small businesses too, the jobs should be of good quality and be the source of sufficiently high productivity to provide a social surplus. Mr Mann’s report contains a number of constructive proposals for a modern and forward-looking policy of this kind towards small businesses. I hope that those amendments that point in the opposite direction will be rejected and that Parliament will send the Commission and the Council a clear signal to the effect that we want to see small, and not so small, businesses that are of good quality and in line with the Lisbon strategy.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, I wished to begin my speech by congratulating the Greek Presidency on the work it has done in very complicated and difficult circumstances. I am glad that during this Presidency the Parliamentary Conference on the Stability and Association Pact in relation to the countries of South-Eastern Europe has been able to take place since it has allowed us to improve our neighbourly relations with the Balkan countries. Winston Churchill said that the Balkans had a very great and very full history which hardly fitted within its territory. I believe that the European Union must manage and improve this relationship, and promote cross-border cooperation between the Balkan countries, as a method for preparing them for their future integration into the European Union. This cross-border cooperation is based on knowledge, understanding and trust in one's neighbours and eventually on cooperation with them. To be able to work on the creation of a free trade area between states, firstly by means of unilateral agreements, progressing towards the disappearance of visas between states and eventually also the disappearance of visas with the European Union. These countries must be integrated into the common foreign and security policy and they must be able to participate in programmes such as Socrates or Leonardo, in order to bring their integration into the European Union closer. The Balkans is a complex region. At the Thessaloniki Summit the European Convention will also be presented. I believe the Convention has not dealt with the complexity of certain European Union Member States, which are not nation states but rather multinational states. We must establish mechanisms to allow these nations without a state, as in the case of Catalonia or the Basque country, to be represented in the bodies of the European Union. In this regard, I believe that Mr Napoletano’s report has been very positive, but certain points, such as the right to bring cases before the High Court of Justice, do not appear in the draft Convention. I believe this is necessary so that the citizens in question can feel directly represented within this European Union, which must be a Europe of the citizens, but also a Europe of the peoples it contains.

Political group: ELDR
Mr President, the Group of the agrees in the main with Mr Cushnahan. Naturally, a balance has been struck, as Mr Brok said. Positive things too are happening in Pakistan, especially the peace talks with India, which are incredibly important and which should have our total support. Is it not a little odd that, whenever we strike balances like this, the commercial, trade-policy aspects almost always end up counting for more than the very clear human rights principles we have written into our agreements? What are we playing at, having human rights clauses in agreements with other countries if we always strike balances that end up with our not bothering about the human rights clauses but allowing other, mainly economic, interests to count for more? This leads to our undermining respect for our own high principles. It is that balance that makes us in the Group think it obvious that we must say no to this agreement now. We hope that Pakistan will understand this signal and take measures that mean we can quite soon say yes instead of no. I should like to have said yes, but that is unfortunately impossible if we are to hold to our human rights principles.

Political group: Verts-ALE
Mr President, I should just like to say in reply to Mr van den Berg that the report on postponing discharge for the Structural Funds is ready and the vote will be taken on the premise that this is indeed merely a postponement and does not grant or refuse discharge and that everything which we worked on together yesterday will be taken into account in the final version, i.e. that we shall nonetheless debate and vote on Mrs Rühle’s report.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, I want to thank Mrs Evans for her contribution on this subject. I had no contact with her but I separately put down a motion for my own group and I speak on their behalf on this subject. My good friend Thomas Mann spoke about the denial of the right to practise religion in one part of the world. But it is just as serious when human rights are denied because people want to impose their religious beliefs on other people. Whether it be the imposition of one's religious beliefs or the denial of the right to practice one's religion, one is as bad as the other. It is quite hard to be moderate in the language we use to condemn this barbarous and cruel act which took place against a 17-year-old girl in Nigeria. A girl who claimed she had been forced to have sex but failed to produce in court the witnesses to support her claim. The cruelty of the sentence, and the fact that she had given birth one month before, makes it very difficult for us to accept any assurances from the government of Nigeria that they are protecting the civil rights of their people and their own population. We should remember that we in the European Union and the United States of America are the main trading partners of Nigeria. We are the people who buy and sell almost all the things they want to buy and sell. We have an obligation to examine the record in human rights of the people we do business with. I would ask the European Commission to take into consideration standards of human rights in all the aid schemes and cooperation schemes that the European Union puts into effect. This is the worst we have heard of to date but we understand there are amputations taking place in Nigeria for relatively minor offences. Some people condemn globalisation, but if there is one good thing about globalisation it means that the world becomes interdependent and we have at least some pressure we can apply. Freedom of expression in Pakistan

Political group: PPE-DE
Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, when we talk about the European Food Safety Authority today, there is one thing in particular that we need to say to the citizens of the European Union. That is that we are convinced even now, without this Food Safety Authority, that the food people in the European Union are consuming is safe. So safe, that I am convinced that it is among the safest in the world. However, if we believe that a food safety authority would have advantages and lead to improvements in the European Union, there must be good reasons for that. I would like to name three conditions that I believe need to be met to achieve such improvements. Mr Bowis and Mr Whitehead have already touched on these points. The first is the quality of the experts. It is not acceptable for people the Member States want to get rid of to be sent to this authority as experts and scientists. It is your job, Commissioner, to invite the Member States to send only the cream of the cream. Secondly, to secure improvements we need transparency and openness. Even more than the scientific committees, which have had a high degree of transparency since the BSE crisis, the Authority needs to ensure that it earns the people's trust. That means that it must be open and transparent in its activities. Lastly, ladies and gentlemen, and Mr Byrne, we need controls. It is also your job, the Commission's job, to convey to the Member States that supervision and control are the most basic tasks of the Member States, something you have criminally neglected in recent years. If we want to carry on guaranteeing safe food, and perhaps even safer food, if we want to win back the people's trust, then we can only do this by meeting these conditions and by tightening up controls. If we do that, the new Food Safety Authority will be a step forward for the European Union. I call on you, Commissioner, to make sure that is the case.

Political group: PSE
Madam President, I believe we are dealing with three adjectives. Free and fair world trade is the basis for the WTO Negotiations – that was my original text. A proposal for an amendment was then agreed in the Committee on Industry, External Trade, Research and Energy, where “socially-balanced” was added. The opinions differ as to which adjectives should be added. I feel in any case that it should be 'free and fair world trade”. Everyone agreed to that. The question of “is socially tolerable” or “socially acceptable” was disputed. We should therefore vote on the original text saying “free and fair world trade” and then vote separately on “socially-balanced”. Then we would have a result on the third point. I should in any case like to point out that 'free and fair world trade” was the basis of all our work and an addition was appended here on which we should now vote.

Political group: PPE-DE
In the debate on this directive that has taken place in the European Parliament over the last few months there are two issues on which no consensus has been reached with regard to their compliance with the principles that have just been referred to. I am talking about the voluntary and unpaid donation of stem cells removed from human embryos and the use of these cells. On the first issue, I believe that, in order to prevent the commercialisation of the human body, we must do more than simply recommend to the Member States that they promote voluntary and unpaid donation. The directive must state, quite unequivocally, that the donation of tissue or cells can only be done out of the donor's free will and always without payment, except possibly for compensation to reimburse travel expenses or light refreshments. On the second issue, – embryonic stem cells – I believe the directive must be cautious, on the one hand obliging Member States to ban both reproductive and therapeutic cloning, but must allow Member States, on the other, to take the decision on whether or not to permit research into supernumerary embryos, that is, embryos created for the purposes of in vitro fertilisation but which can no longer be implanted into the genetic parents and are therefore frozen and condemned to be destroyed. - Report Ferreira (A5-0049/2003)

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, this year, the fires in the Mediterranean, and in Greece in particular, broke all previous records. I believe that the area destroyed by the fires was twice as large as at any other time and a great many people were killed despite the fact, of course, that the Greek Government was well prepared and despite the fact that Greece now has some of the best fire-fighting equipment, aeroplanes and human resources in the world. What it has proved is that reaction is not enough. We need to be pro-active. That is what we all say, but none of us does anything. It is a complicated issue and, of course, it concerns local authorities and the national government. What can the European Union do? What it can do, Mr President, is to apply a more active basic policy with more coordination and increased intervention. It can examine the weaknesses of the common agricultural policy, which to all intents and purposes destroys the motivation of people living in and from forests and drives them away. The common agricultural policy subsidises pasturing on burnt ground, subsidises animals which graze on burnt ground, at the same time as our forests are trying to reproduce naturally. The European Union should also, of course, review its approach to and priorities for investments. We have been crying for a land register for a long time now, especially a forest register and forest maps, which need to be supported as a matter of priority over everything else and, of course, any other development and investment measures which boost the development of forests as forests rather than a commodity and which enable people who live off the forest to stay there. That is the best form of prevention and the best form of protection. Of course we shall still have fires and, with what is happening to the climate, we shall no doubt be unfortunate enough to witness more and more serious phenomena. But it is in our hands to try and do what we can to forestall the known causes at least.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, Commissioner, the European Parliament has proven its far-sightedness on this matter and I should like to thank the two rapporteurs from the Committee on the Environment and the Committee on Agriculture for their work. They have approached the issue with the same consistency demonstrated by the European Parliament. Allow me to refresh your memory: compulsory registration has applied for a long time, because Regulation No 820/97 entered into force on 1 January 2000. The postponement adopted is not lawful. The European Parliament has filed charges against the Council because the postponement was not within the Council’s discretion. Nor did the Commission come up smelling of roses here. It was the Commission which proposed this seemingly elegant but legally dubious procedure. If nothing is done, compulsory labelling will enter into force on 1 September 2000. The Commission is therefore urged to accept the European Parliament’s proposals in this codecision process by 1 September. We have tried in our suit to ensure that no equally elegant attempt will be made to implement an extension on 1 September – and I hope that we shall succeed in putting a stop to this. If we cannot agree on Parliament’s proposals by 1 September, then the old regulation with the compulsory system will enter into force. I therefore hope that you will implement Parliament’s reasonable proposals and that you will give up your plan to postpone this once again until the year 2003. It will confuse our citizens and will certainly meet with decisive resistance here in Parliament.

Political group: Verts-ALE
Mr President, the directive limiting noise and exhaust emissions from recreational craft is based on the need to harmonise emissions in the EU. This in turn has its roots in the needs of industry and the manufacturers of recreational craft and the objective of a more viable internal market. The inverse of this can also be seen, as Commissioner Liikanen said, in that the question is also that we are finding ways of improving standards of environmental protection. It really is very important in this sector because waterways, for example, lakes, are often very vulnerable and they are also stocks of drinking water. Furthermore, recreational boating is a leisure activity, and people want to spend their time in the most tranquil surroundings possible. The reasons given for protection of waters are therefore, I believe, justifiable, and the better emission norms we obtain the better things will be. The notion, however, that we might specify different emission limits for sea areas and internal water areas will not work on any account. It would, perhaps, in some parts of Europe but not where internal waters – lakes – are directly linked to the sea by means of rivers or canals, for example, and where people are very keen on boating. It would be very hard to tell people that they must change engines when they reach the sea. I am therefore in favour of emission limit values being as stringent as possible, but these kinds of artificial limits cannot be imposed. However, I do enthusiastically support our being able to impose tighter limits nationally, regionally and locally, as it is absolutely clear that the waters in different parts of Europe also differ greatly from one another. Certain areas need special protection from noise and other emissions, and this option must exist. Another issue, not connected with this directive, but connected with boating and the environment, is all the other waste associated with boating. By this I mean litter and other associated problems that boating causes. This must also be a cause of concern to us when we talk about the environment and boating. For example, boating organisations should be given the task of informing and enlightening their members with regard to what it means to be a good yachtsman, one who takes care of the environment. It will obviously then be society’s task to arrange things in such a way that yachtsmen can be responsible for their environment.

Political group: PSE
The incidence of breast cancer has been steadily increasing. The report that has just been adopted argues that the prevention, early detection, diagnosis, treatment and follow-up of the disease must be improved. According to the WHO, 216 000 new cases of breast cancer were diagnosed in the European Union in 2000, and in that year 79 000 women died of the disease. This is the most common cancer in women, affecting one in nine and is the most common cause of death in women between the ages of 35 and 55. The risk of developing breast cancer is 60% higher in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe, hence the proposal to create, by 2008, the conditions required for a 25% reduction in the average breast-cancer mortality rate in the EU. The Member States are invited to offer all women aged between the ages of 50 and at least 69 a mammography every two years, as laid down in the European Directives on Guaranteeing the Quality of Mammographic Screening, since only eight of the fifteen Member States currently have national screening programmes. All women suffering from this form of cancer must have the right to be treated by multidisciplinary teams. Hence our vote in favour of the report.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, Commissioner, within the global framework of relations between the European Union and Morocco, I would like to highlight, on the occasion of this oral question on the fisheries agreement which we are dealing with today, the regional dimension of that agreement. I refer to a Community region, European politically speaking but African geographically speaking, which is called the Canary Islands and is situated on the Atlantic flank opposite Morocco. In recent years, including Spain’s time as a democracy, we have experienced various situations where fishing has always been an unresolved issue between the parties because of the contentious issue of defining our territorial waters in relation to the neighbouring continent of Africa. Nevertheless, we have recently managed to take cooperative positions, by means of the Morocco-European Union agreements, despite having other unresolved matters, such as agriculture (tomatoes), the environment (nuclear energy policy) and the Saharan referendum, which affects us significantly from a global point of view. In fact, the Committee on Agriculture and Fisheries of the Spanish Senate has begun a visit to the Canary Islands in order to directly familiarise themselves with the problems facing the primary sector: agriculture and fishing. The President of the Government of the Canary Islands has also expressed his desire to visit Morocco in order to hold a dialogue and often a direct channel of communication with the Moroccan Government, along the lines of the good neighbourliness which should characterise the relations between two neighbouring and civilised peoples, since frequently the viscosity of reality – as Mr Obiols said so well the other day during the debate in Brussels in relation to the common destiny of Europe and Morocco – does not always permit the most appropriate type of action. We trust that peace and stability will reign in our Atlantic area and we have a good opportunity to use the fisheries agreement or other European instruments for transnational cooperation to achieve this. I hope that Morocco will fulfil its international obligations, as indicated in the talks held last week in Brussels by the Moroccan authorities. In any event, I hope that the diplomacy of the European Commission will adequately defend the general interests of the Community fishermen who are affected by this future fisheries agreement between the European Union and Morocco. Lastly, I would like to remind you of a Spanish saying – which I believe is relevant today – which says: “he who wants to eat fish, Commissioner, must get his breeches wet”. For this reason there are many of us here, Mr Fischler, who want to convince you of the social and economic importance of renewing the European Union-Morocco fisheries agreement.

Political group: ELDR
Mr President, there is a reason why Mr Lannoye was appointed rapporteur of this proposal, which seeks with this global partnership to achieve sustainable development in the world, for I am sad to say that many people – and there are a great many – live in poverty. The hope and the desire behind this appointment is that Mr Lannoye, who, as we know, usually draws up reports on foods such as chocolate, butter and marmalade, which are constantly available to us, will succeed in doing as much for the developing countries. Let us hope so! - World Food Summit (FAO) (B5-0262/2002)

Political group: PPE-DE