Mr President, there are days when it seems easy to do one’s job and other days when it is difficult to do one’s job. For me, today is one of the latter, a day on which we have difficult problems to resolve. These problems are of two kinds. There is a political problem to settle and that is the matter of how are we going to proceed with the fingerprinting system for asylum-seekers and illegal immigrants or those staying illegally, as they are described by the Council and the European Union authorities, and how are we going to proceed with the controversial arguments of our colleague Mr Pirker? I shall begin with the latter, because it is logically more fun to discuss politics in Parliament than on paper. If anyone should take the blame here for the fact that we are finding it so hard to find common ground, then it is the rapporteur. You, Mr Pirker, with your proposals for amendments, have from the beginning endeavoured to aggravate the work that the Council has submitted to us, which is already highly controversial. We cannot hold that against you, it is your political right, but you must be aware that the in this House cannot support the restrictive measures, that as a conservative Austrian, you wish to pursue! (Applause from The second point that I should like to make here is that when you express regret about the poor Social Democrats and the contradictions between them and the German government, the whole story should be told. Mr Schily wrote you a letter that he also sent to Mr Nassauer and myself. In his letter, Mr Schily referred to the difficulties that we as Social Democrats have picked as a central theme in this consultation procedure and gave his opinion from his point of view as the German Minister of the Interior. This letter arrived in the last few days and it gave rise to a lively debate in the Social Democratic Group that led to us asking you to give us a little more time so that we can finish discussing this controversial subject, in order then to attempt to work with you by consensus. I discussed this with you yesterday evening at 10 p.m., but we know your position and what you will say: We have the majority here, we will get it through and anyone who is not with us is actually refusing to face up to reality – as you put it so well yourself! This is not the way to create a reasonable asylum policy in the European Union! It must be built on a broad consensus and not on exclusion and confrontation, as you seem to wish. What is our problem? The Council has said, and there is some understanding in our Group for this, that we need to extend the registration system for asylum-seekers to other target groups and you have used perfectly good arguments that we also appreciate. For example, the system should afford protection to minors, who are smuggled in illegally and who are here forced into prostitution, amongst other things. This kind of fingerprinting system can be seen as giving them a certain police and state protection. Our problem is a constitutional one. Should we not separate those people who, as political victims of persecution claim a basic right to which they are entitled, i.e. protection from this persecution, from those who have, for example, entered a country illegally or who have smuggled people in, or from those who have been smuggled in against their will? Should we not separate this group of people? Because we believe that this discussion is not yet at an end and because we also wish to discuss the subject again with Minister Schily, we have asked you to wait a fortnight. What if you now say, a year has gone by, for goodness sake, and we cannot wait another fortnight, Mr Pirker! (Applause from So I must say to you that the method you are using is intensifying the debate in this House. That is not a good thing! I will say to you now – trusting in the liberality of the -, that with this strategy you will fail in the long term! For today you have again been lucky, but in the long term this exclusion method will not be successful. We are not against Eurodac, in principle, but we would have liked more time for consultation. You did not want to give it to us. You alone are responsible for this impasse! (Applause)

Political group: PSE