GwendalTsang/DEFT09-parquet huggingface dataset:
Mr President, this report should be welcomed for its well-rounded approach. It highlights in a factual and non-alarmist manner the enormous potential of the European biotechnology industry for assisting economic growth, for encouraging job creation and improving the competitiveness of our industries. But it is not all about growth. As we live longer we also need to ensure that we live better and the infirmities of older people have to be addressed. Diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, diabetes, heart disease and even cancer have yet to be fully challenged by the biotechnologists. It is not only a question of living better, we have to be fitter so that older people can continue by their work to contribute to the wealth of society. Long life and a healthy life have to be earned. I am convinced that in plant, animal and human biology lie the biggest challenges of the 21st century. I very strongly support that section of the report which calls for more concrete proposals for action from the Commission and Council. We need the Commission to report on the present state of the industry and the comparisons between Member States and to give us better data for future action. The development of a plan for a bio-Europe – paralleling the e-Europe – for activities of the Commission and Member States to make the Union a competitor for the biotechnology industry is a worthy aim. The Council should also commit to biotechnology as a key new technology and the Stockholm Summit would be a useful time for them to do this. The region that I represent has the lowest GDP per head of any region in the United Kingdom. It is not a comfortable position and one of the key developments in the regional economic planning is to support a company to stimulate growth in biotechnology industries. We call it Bio-Science-North. The aim is to draw on research in university departments, to establish incubator companies and stimulate growth in those that are already established. We believe that this is one of the most important instruments that we have been able to put in place in the last two or three years, with of course support from the European Regional Development Fund. I know that our region is not alone in that but I believe that this is something that all regions in the Community should be examining. The final point I would like to make is that we must reinforce the environmental possibilities of biotechnology. It should be recognised that it gives us tremendous opportunities for tackling pollution and reducing resource depletion and gives us opportunities in the food sector to improve the output from our agricultural industries. I hope that the biotechnology industry will get a tremendous boost from the adoption of this report.

Political group: PSE
The vote on the fund which was tabled late by the Council was facilitated by the EP without debate, on the understanding from all groups including the that there would be no amendments. It would seem that at the instigation of Ms Patricia McKenna, the broke this understanding. As a consequence of this I was being asked to vote on amendments which I had not had the opportunity to consult about or research and on which I would be precluded from debating on the floor of the House. The company criticised in the amendments (Raytheon) was in fact welcomed by two Nobel Peace Prize winners (Hume/Trimble). In addition, if we are to shut down or refuse investment from every company which may have an association with the arms industry, then we would have to close virtually every American and Japanese software company on the island of Ireland with catastrophic consequences. I am opposed to the arms industry but we must not put at risk the economic prosperity of Northern Ireland with ill-conceived and badly researched amendments in the European Parliament.

Political group: PSE
Mr President, Commissioner, I would like to say, by way of introduction, that I regret that it is so late in the day that we are dealing with topics of interest to young people. The galleries are empty. All day long, there are young people sitting in the galleries and now their issues are being discussed there is, unfortunately, nobody there. Perhaps we can change that in the future, when proximity to our citizens might mean that people understood what goes on in this House. Despite that, I rejoice at the initiative that has been set in motion, and I would like to thank you too, Commissioner, for the way sport has been brought more into the field of vision of European policy and perhaps getting more attention. I am convinced that sport merits such attention, playing as it does a very large number of roles in society, for example, enhancing communication skills and social skills, personality development, preventing ill health and more of the same besides. Sport is a very important factor in social and economic policy. As an initiative, the Year of Sport or of Education through Sport is a very good first step, and one that needs to be followed by many more. Despite that, there is one criticism that I would like to address, one on which I agree with Mrs Pack. The title of ‘Year of Education through Sport’ is intended to restrict the events to schools. I cannot go along with that, believing as I do that clubs and organisations have to be involved in the activities and supported in doing so. Education through Sport does not only happen in schools, but mainly in clubs and in an immense number of sporting organisations. The Year of Education through Sport must also, I believe, make an impression on clubs and acknowledge the work they do. I also expect there to be much discussion in this House of the values that sport embodies, about what, for example, fair play is, about the nature of amateur and professional sport, about what is meant by training and care for young sportsmen and sportswomen and a good deal else. Discussion must range far and wide. If we leave an area out, it will only be half a job and we will have wasted an opportunity. The European Year of Languages was, I think, a very good example. It involved both the schools and every sort of educational organisation, making it possible to spark many initiatives and get many new schemes moving. We should take it as our example. It worked, and the same thing can also – must also – work in sport. Sport is movement! You should not be restricting movement, but encouraging it. That calls for scope for development and also for financial guarantees. (Applause)

Political group: PSE
I thank the Commissioner for his statement. Although there is only a pre-accession agreement with Turkey, he can be assured that the European Parliament is fully aware of Turkey's candidate or non-candidate status and that this has some legal impact. I was one of a number of Members who petitioned the Commissioner to include an assessment in his last report, last November, on this specific issue. This did not happen, so I very much hope that an in-depth analysis of the human rights, environmental and other impacts of this pipeline will form part of the assessment this year. Could the Commissioner help all of us by saying what mechanisms, approach and analysis he is going to take to investigate this? What will he be doing between now and November to answer the questions, so that we can be assured his report is full and fair?

Political group: PSE
Madam President, I will have the opportunity later to speak on behalf of my Group. I will allude to a number of my Group's concerns and criticisms about this project, but in substance, taking the totality of the work that has been done, the significant progress that has been made, and the prospect that in my view we are unlikely through a delay to significantly enhance the document, I would commend to the House that we should vote to proceed with our discussion and the adoption or rejection of the document, because that choice is there, and we have to hear the debate on it. At any rate, now is the moment to seize our opportunity to try to draw this prolonged matter to a close, to move on, and to build on our interinstitutional relations in a positive way. (Parliament rejected the request to postpone the vote) President. – As requested, each group will now have two minutes to explain its position briefly.

Political group: ELDR
Mr President, I do not wish to reopen a debate which this Parliament has already had but you were elected on a programme for reform of this House. Powerful elements in the two major groups have blocked that reform and I hope, Mr President, that the Council and the Commission, represented here today, will see the strength of feeling in this House in favour of such reform, greater than it has ever been, and will take that into account.

Political group: ELDR
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, on the subject of the Kirkhope report, I would like to say that the problem must indeed be addressed. However, my group has a number of concerns: we must avoid a situation where the innocent become the victims, namely carriers and freight carriers in general. They are often under heavy social pressure, must adhere to certain times and are sometimes oblivious to the fact that they are transporting people. Carriers may be middlemen in the criminal network, in which case they should be penalised for the trafficking in, and smuggling of, human beings. But they can also help combat the criminal network by reporting the fact that there are people being transported in their lorries illegally. However, the carrier may also be a taxi driver who picks up people in Sangatte or the centre of Calais, for example, and takes them over the border. Should he perhaps check their documents? Additional problems can occur for people who are in fact travelling with documents, but ones which are difficult to verify. Another scenario is of people hitching a lift and declaring that they will be seeking asylum, but not doing so immediately and disappearing underground. I would like to be clear about who will be checking all these documents in future. In my opinion, there are not enough people available to check all documents.

Political group: Verts-ALE
Mr President, I merely want to say that we Liberals do not want to participate in these votes concerning natural disasters because we think that they do not belong in this Parliament. We also believed that we had reached an understanding that we should no longer discuss resolutions of this type.

Political group: ELDR
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, even though the foreign policy of nation states is, by tradition, a matter for the executive, money for certain foreign-policy activities has to be authorised by their parliaments. The right of control over the budget is the traditional means whereby a national parliament exercises parliamentary control over foreign policy, and so we are very glad that this budget enables us to take a further step on the road towards parliamentary control of the common foreign and security policy. An agreement is in place with the Council, which has given an assurance that, prior to future decisions – in particular on joint actions – Parliament, the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Committee on Budgets will be notified at a point in time at which they can still exert some influence on the measure as a whole. We now appeal to the Convention to enshrine this accordingly in the nascent European constitution and to beef it up. Nobody wants to put a question mark against the Member States' right to reach autonomous decisions on foreign policy matters, but if Parliament is expected to make funds available, then it has to be given advance notice. We have seen many examples over the past few years of foreign policy undertakings being given and our budget procedure having to be used to find the money for them by cuts being made somewhere in the budget. As our colleague Mr Bourlanges once put it: ‘The reconstruction of the former Yugoslavia, and of the Balkans, was paid for by Africa, as that is where we had to make cuts to make it possible.’ This agreement with the Council is an important step towards this no longer being the case in future, and towards foreign policy competence bearing some relation to the budget procedure, and we encourage the Convention to take this into account in the work it is doing.

Political group: PPE-DE
I would like to say thank you very much for a nice reply, which, however, did not quite answer my questions. We perhaps, therefore, need to discuss this in the future in order to get a complete answer. We all want to combat cyber crime. It is important that it is crime that is curbed and not the new economy. To this end, all parties concerned must be involved in this consultation and present their views in good time. This not only applies to the EU institutions and Member States, but also to the consumer and industry, so that we do not find ourselves in a situation of inconsistency in which one hand is doing something relating to the eEurope initiative, while at the same time we are doing something else in connection with crime. It is a question of creating confidence in development if e-commerce is to work. Therefore, the work cannot be carried out in secret. Rather, it is important that we obtain analyses in this area of the consequences of the proposals. In Feira it is precisely consumer confidence that is being identified as a key factor for the development of e-commerce. I would like to conclude with a follow-up question: when will we get an assessment of the consequences for consumers, industry and economic espionage, which may otherwise be in danger of developing?

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, as speakers have already said, this has been an historic day for the current process of enlargement. I would like to look beyond Copenhagen to see what is going to happen in the next stage. Some speakers have raised the question of whether Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's comments about Turkey were outdated, whether this was the wrong message at the wrong time and whether, if Turkey should become a member, that would really be the end of Europe as we know it. He is right to raise this issue, because once we say yes definitively to Turkey and give it a date, how can we say no to Ukraine, Belarus and other countries which probably have more of their landmass within Europe than Turkey does? Mr Rasmussen, Mr Watson and Mr Haarder have been very liberal in saying that once the political criteria have been met we can give a date for Turkey. What about the economic criteria in the Copenhagen Declaration of June 1993? Central to that declaration was the question of institutional stability, which we all seem to be forgetting as we go about welcoming countries into the Union. Do we really think that the Union is going to be stable once Turkey, and perhaps other countries, which will then no doubt be welcomed under the same criteria, have joined, and that the Union can then be effectively managed? This question will be examined at the NATO summit on enlargement later this week in Prague. The question which people are now asking is whether NATO is really capable of acting and whether it will be really effective once it has more central and eastern European countries? The same applies to the European Union. The Helsinki Council made Turkey an official candidate country. So did the association agreement of 1961, but will the European Union, with Turkey as a full member, really be fully capable of acting and democratically accountable? My thesis is threefold. Firstly, we should pause once the ten countries have come in and once we are completing the negotiations for Romania and Bulgaria. To set a date now, or even to set a date for a date, is premature. Secondly we must examine every single avenue, such as a special partnership with Turkey, before we commit ourselves to the full process of opening accession negotiations. Perhaps most important of all, the Copenhagen Council should set a process in motion, as Mr Prodi mentioned this morning, to consider our approach to future candidates seeking membership of the Union, so that we know how to deal with them. In conclusion, the European Council, headed by the Danes, is sleepwalking into the future. It is easier for everyone to say yes rather than no, but at this stage it seems that no member of the European Council wishes to say yes to Turkey, but none wishes to say no either. Let us be clear in our thinking and let us have a clear strategy so that we can assure Europe's citizens that in ten years' time they will have a stable, prosperous and effective European Union.

Political group: PPE-DE
The British Conservatives support the use by the EU of certain civil instruments to help head off or alleviate crises in third countries. These include humanitarian and development aid, mine action, election monitoring, financial and practical assistance to strengthen the judiciary and the rule of law and the civil administration, and well-targeted economic sanctions where appropriate. The EU institutions should focus their efforts on improving their efficiency in delivering these. However, we are firmly opposed to any idea of developing a ‘European Police Force’, we believe that the European contribution to military rapid reaction forces should be conducted through NATO, and that ‘operational capacity’ that relates to either of these aspects is a matter for individual nations and not a matter for the EU. - Property values

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, Commissioner, it falls to me to summarise the problems of the COM in bananas in just a few minutes. That is a considerable challenge and one which makes no sense unless we understand what is really at stake in this issue. It has been a source of conflict for at least a decade, both at the trading level – between the operators – and at the institutional and international level. The reason for that is simple. The banana is now one of the great basic human foodstuffs and control of the trade clearly has a geostrategic dimension. This is a tropical fruit marketed in the Northern hemisphere and its distribution is also a fundamental part of North-South cooperation. The real question we face is whether or not the European Union can succeed in organising, within its own market, a juxtaposition of flows from the producer regions of Europe, the ACP countries and Latin America. Today we are debating a proposal from the European Commission which, by providing for an automatic swing towards tariffs, will lead to the ineluctable disappearance of production in European regions, which currently represents 25% of our market supply. Such a development would be contrary to the actual purpose of regional policy and the common agricultural policy – the two pillars of the European Union – and we do not want that under any circumstances. So we must resolutely set the prospect to one side by adopting the Dary report. I congratulate and thank Mr Dary. For those fundamental reasons, and to protect the interests of consumers on the European market by maintaining a juxtaposition of flows from the Union, the ACP countries and third countries, in the context of genuine and sustained competition based on an adequate number of operators, we ask you to accept all the proposed amendments. Failure on this sensitive banana issue would be an admission of weakness on the part of the European Union and would represent a very strong and rousing signal, exploited by all opponents of the common agricultural policy to oppose the social, family and multi-functional agricultural model. It is our duty to preserve everything the Union stands for, especially on the eve of its enlargement. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, after all the distressing incidents which occurred during the bombing of Yugoslavia and the disclosures about the use of depleted uranium ammunition, the top priority today is to ban this type of ammunition, which has dangerous consequences both the second it is fired and for a long time afterwards, and which is undiscriminating, i.e. which makes no distinction between those who are at risk of suffering its effects. We also need, equally urgently, to formulate a large-scale assistance, prevention and reconstruction policy for the whole of Yugoslavia affected by the use of this ammunition, in order to protect public health and the environment, clean up the ground and the waters and safeguard the unimpeded development of the country and the region in general. The joint motion for a resolution under discussion does not completely cover the first objective, but it does have the merit of calling for a moratorium on the use of these weapons. As for the second objective, a few general, abstract references are made to existing assistance programmes which, however you look at it, are of limited scope, while there appears to be no sign of any intention to engage in new, efficient intervention at the level of real needs, as circumstances requires. For the rest, the motion for a resolution extends – with a few brief references – to very serious matters, such as the analysis of and the need for research into depleted uranium, but makes no mention whatsoever of the constant efforts being made to confuse and conceal the facts, independent research which we all know about and even official texts issued by NATO countries on the danger of depleted uranium and the protective measures which they themselves impose on their forces. It is for these reasons that I am unable to vote in favour of the motion for a resolution. I shall return a blank ballot paper because the call for a moratorium on the use of depleted uranium may be a positive step in the right direction, not that this means that war, internationally illegal bombings and other similar, fruitless interventions will stop. In all events, constant efforts must be made and a mass movement throughout Europe and the whole world must endeavour to bring about a definitive ban on all these weapons, thereby dealing a blow to the high-handedness and arrogance of the militaristic perception of politics and the world. Finally, I wish to state that I am nonplussed by the political sleight of hand during our debate: just as we were accused in the past of serving NATO and the bombings by criticising Milosevic's policy, now Mr Solana accuses us, in our criticism of the use of depleted uranium, of forgetting the human rights of Milosevic's victims. In both cases, anyone with a lack of arguments on the matter at issue will forget the principles of rationalism and flirt with the irrational, which is the precursor to any type of totalitarianism or Stalinism. - Resolution on Korea

Political group: GUE-NGL