GwendalTsang/DEFT09-parquet huggingface dataset:
I voted enthusiastically for the report by our fellow Member, Olivier Duhamel, because it sounds the same note as the great voices and great expressions of resolve that have, step by step, advanced the course of European integration since the war. But this particular voice, and this is significant, is a parliamentary voice, the voice of an institution that attests a little more each day to the authority of the peoples within the Union and its triangle of institutions. Step by step, treaty by treaty, and we hope the Treaty of Nice will not belie this, the old nationalist attitudes within Europe are expanding out of these narrow confines leading to the creation of a world power in a world of giants. Everyone here knows that Europe, its currency, its diplomacy, its security, its civilisation, its culture and its social model can only truly survive the splendid history of its peoples, but also the fruitless dissension between them, by becoming a federation of nation states with strong, coherent and respected institutions, enshrined in a European Constitution, towards which Mr Duhamel has paved the way. Until the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997, Europe was an intergovernmental super-syndicate. With the Treaty of Amsterdam and the extension of the codecision procedure, the European Parliament has effectively set Europe on the road to political integration and supranationality. If, tomorrow, the Union wishes to embrace Europe in its entirety, the geographical Europe, extending even beyond the next wave of enlargement, it will need institutions that are fully mature in political and democratic terms. What history will remember of this year 2000, which some people find too dull, is that it saw the advancement and affirmation of the idea of a European Constitution, backed by the majority of Members of this Parliament, which led, today, to the adoption of the Duhamel report. That is why we must fervently hope that the Nice Summit and the Intergovernmental Conference prove a success, so as to enable us, quite simply, to make further progress very rapidly. - Gil-Robles report (A5-0288/2000)

Political group: PSE
Decentralised cooperation is a form of intervention that complements the EU’s development policy. Its main aim is to improve the quality of aid and to create conditions for the undertaking of further action and cooperation. Its main characteristic should not therefore be the amount of funding. The development, moreover, of the legislative framework does not appear to have resulted so far in a greater take-up of appropriations, while the financial reference amount in the European Commission's proposal for 2004-2006 makes provision for an average annual sum which is higher than that of the previous period of application of the action and which, in my opinion, corresponds to the objective set. I agree with the objectives and the need to continue the action. In addition, the size of the aid and its experimental character impose a flexible procedure in order to optimise its efficiency. However, it is understandable that action by these agencies and the management of Community funds on their part should be characterised by transparency and honest financial management. Finally, I should like to point out the dynamic character of this form of cooperation. It is important for the annual evaluation of the action not to be limited to a quantitative presentation of the actions funded, but also to include a qualitative evaluation of the cooperation so as to reveal the trends taking shape for coming years.

Political group: PPE-DE
For many years in this Parliament I have supported the principle of gradual controlled liberalisation of postal services with a view to creating an effective single market in the postal domain. This support, however, has been conditional on the preservation of a high quality universal service. This is indispensable, especially for rural, remote and sparsely populated areas and even for certain parts of towns and cities too. In such places, postmen perform what I might even describe as a socio-cultural function, a function that I sincerely hope we can afford to maintain in our affluent society. In the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs I tabled a number of amendments to the Commission proposal. All the amendments relating to the recitals were adopted, but then, all of a sudden, along came a number of my honourable colleagues, some of whom were not members of the committee, and agreed to coordinate their votes, which resulted in the rejection of the amendments to the articles corresponding to the amended recitals. This naturally produced an utter shambles, which prompted a majority of the committee members, quite rightly, to reject this half-baked document. For that reason, the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs was unable to formulate an opinion. I am therefore particularly grateful to the rapporteur of the lead committee, Mr Markus Ferber, for having produced an acceptable compromise which largely takes account of the letter and spirit of my amendments. I can live with this, especially since - it does not contain a new definition of special services, and - the price and weight limits are set at reasonable levels, with weights of up to 150 grams remaining the sole preserve of the universal service, linked with a price ceiling of four times the public tariff. The limits of 50 grams and two and a half times the public tariff are truly too drastic and would have had dire consequences for the providers of universal postal services. This would also have been the case if outgoing cross-border mail and express services had been entirely liberalised, which the Luxembourg postal service in particular, because of our country's size and geographical situation, could not have withstood. The compromise takes account of my amendment to this effect, which means that I can endorse the report with a clear conscience at this first reading. However, I repudiate the insinuations made by those who advocate forced liberalisation with no regard for the loss of people's quality of life and jobs, who seek to present me and the honourable Members who share my view as acting on behalf of the post-office lobby which is intent on preserving its monopoly. I emphatically reject such insinuations.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, in one minute you can say very little but I concur with what Mr van Orden, Mrs Kinnock and many of the other speakers have said. I was in what was then Rhodesia in the 1960s and there was a great deal of injustice in that country at that time. We had such great hopes for President Mugabe. We thought we had in him a liberal, serious, intelligent leader. Unfortunately, as we see the developing chaos and threats of famine and the destruction of the economy, we can but mourn the fact that he did not fulfil the hopes we had of him. I agree that the smart sanctions are the way to go, because already the ordinary people of Zimbabwe are suffering grievously, as they watch their country disintegrate into chaos. I urge all colleagues to support this resolution.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, I would like to welcome the Commission’s Communication, but above all I would like to congratulate Mr van den Berg on his excellent report, which I believe contains elements and measures that are essential in this task. Mr President, 65 million girls in the world are deprived of their right to education and we are doing very little to resolve this situation. The framework presented by the Commission, as stated by Mr van den Berg, contains very few proposals for action that specifically promote education for girls. This in itself is serious, but it is even more serious if we take into account the fact that babies whose mothers have not had access to education are twice as likely to suffer from malnutrition and die before the age of five than those whose mothers have completed primary education. Just one or two years of school for the mother reduce the infant death rate by 15%. The education of mothers is far more effective in reducing malnutrition than any other measure, including the availability of food. We know that women are a determining factor in development: better-trained women mean a higher level of development for their societies. The strategy to combat poverty and, of course, the fight against AIDS can only be successful if specific emphasis is placed on education for girls. Therefore, and because it is their fundamental right, education must be our priority: high-quality, obligatory, general, public, primary education lasting at least six years. Education – I repeat – must be our priority. That is the reason why I shall use my final seconds of speaking time to plead the case, as the rapporteur has done, against including education in the general agreement on trade and services at the next WTO negotiations. The right of boys and girls to education cannot be subject to market laws.

Political group: PSE
Mr President, in order to achieve legislation in the field of immigration at Community level we should pay particular attention to the positive effects of immigration, something we are debating here today. I come from a country – Spain – from which, until a few years ago, many citizens emigrated in search of work and today we are a country into which, thanks to our growth and stability, we receive many immigrants in search of work, often honourable work, who undoubtedly make a positive contribution to our companies and who often carry out work which our citizens reject. The current reality, with migratory flows which are speeding up all the time, is reflected every day in the Spanish press. We see thousands of Moroccans and Sub-Saharan Africans arriving on our territory looking for work. In view of this reality, which is not confined to Spain, we must look for a way to control and regulate the situation, in order to prevent the growing networks trafficking in immigrants. The fight against illegal immigration requires the regulation of legal immigration. If there are employment opportunities but we do not allow the legal entry of immigrants, we will be promoting illegal immigration, and with it work which is often sub-human, dishonest and sometimes even verging on extortion. I therefore welcome the Commission’s proposal since it promotes a coordinated economic migration policy. However, as other rapporteurs from my group have said, we must maintain the Member States’ competence to regulate how many immigrants they can receive to cover the work possibilities. We must be prudent. The admission of immigrants into our labour market may become a problem in the future when the situations of each of our countries change and our labour markets have higher unemployment rates than the current ones. We cannot provide direct access to the labour market for illegal immigrants, particularly those who entered legally, but who are now in our territory illegally, people desperate to find work. This would undoubtedly lead to exploitation by many employers and the extortion I mentioned earlier. We must improve all the possible mechanisms for the employment of immigrants from their countries of origin. We must give employers the opportunity to employ these immigrants so that the relationship between the immigrants in the State of origin and the employers is as fluid as possible.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr Vidal-Quadras said that the party I represent, and I myself, want to subvert the Spanish Constitution. The positions we advocate have nothing to do with subversion. According to the Spanish Constitution, the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country, to which I belong, has certain exclusive competences in certain areas. On tax issues, for example. Decisions are habitually made in the Council of Ministers of the European Union on fiscal issues while the interested parties are not represented there to defend themselves, as is the case with our Autonomous Community of the Basque Country and the Autonomous Community of Navarre. We do not feel represented by the Madrid government because we have frequent differences on the issue of sovereignty; a sovereignty which has not been granted us as a result of the generosity of the Madrid government, but which originates from the historic rights of the Basque people.

Political group: Verts-ALE
If you are looking for support, then I would be pleased to support this proposal from the because it concerns an extremely positive development in Macedonia, which could in fact be further consolidated by a swift endorsement from Parliament. I believe this to be a matter of great importance. (Parliament rejected the request) President. – The order of business is adopted thus amended.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, Commissioner, we are forever discussing transitional periods and the related problems. Can you imagine our introducing the notion of pre-accession transition periods, starting to iron out the problems now by means of bilateral agreements between countries and developing an incentive system to that end? In other words, for the key areas, which we all know and which are constantly being cited, we should devise a system of incentives that would enable us to solve these problems in advance, before these countries accede to the Union.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President and the Council, two weeks ago, the joint resolution on the situation in the Middle East tabled by the Group of the , the Group of the European Liberal, Democrat and Reform Party, the Group of the and the Confederal Group of the was voted through by a narrow margin here in the European Parliament. We in the Christian Democratic Group of the European People’s Party and voted against. The truth is the only way to genuine peace, reconciliation and coexistence. Those who tabled the resolution chose to criticise the State of Israel on twelve occasions, but the Palestinians and the Palestinian Authority on only three occasions. Neither Hamas nor Islamic Jihad, labelled as terrorist organisations by the United States and the EU, were mentioned or criticised in the European Parliament’s resolution. Nor was there any mention of the groups designated as terrorists by the United States, namely Hezbollah and the Al-Aqsa Brigades. The last-named group constitutes the military wing of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement and is responsible for the suicide bombing in Jerusalem on 12 April in which six Israeli civilians were killed. Only three speakers made any specific mention at all of these terrorist groups during the two-hour plenary debate in Strasbourg on 10 April. Nonetheless, everyone knows that these men associated with violence and suicide bombings – these people who are happy to see sons or daughters sent to kill other people and who receive money from Iraq for the purpose – are not at all prepared to recognise the State of Israel’s right to exist in the area. I say to the President and to the Spanish Presidency that these terrorist groups are a part of everyday life in the Middle East. How are we to deal with their existence? The Group chose to vote against last time because we feel that the EU and the European Parliament are becoming less and less relevant to the parties. The debate in this House reveals a type of one-sidedness which means that we are not taken seriously by either party to this deeply tragic and bloody conflict. The time should be past when the European Parliament adopts politically lightweight resolutions simply in order to achieve what, from an objective point of view, is an impossible consensus across the whole political spectrum, from -wing s and communists by way of social democrats to green liberals and , Eurosceptics and members of the radical right. The time has come for the EU to become relevant to both parties in the Middle East.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, if they are not to be in breach of the principles of our European community of values, those who seek to remove the arms embargo on China must first have clear evidence of a change in the human rights situation. Chancellor Schröder wanted to curry favour with the Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. In the hope of improving the climate for exports, he rashly added his voice to those calling for an end to the embargo, thereby pressing amateurishly ahead without consulting with other states. On this I am in absolute agreement with Mr Cohn-Bendit. He is not so much Confucius as confused! (Applause) Back in 1989, the embargo was a response to the savagery with which the democracy movement was put down; today, it is among the most important instruments bringing political pressure to bear in favour of change in the People’s Republic of China. Those who think in merely economic terms are blind in one eye. I can tell Mr Swoboda that Amnesty International is talking in terms of 1 500 executions carried out every year, with hundreds of thousands of people in jail, maltreated, tortured, and waiting in vain for a fair trial. Conditions for the Tibetans, Mongols and other minorities remain intolerable and our keeping quiet about them will do nothing to improve matters. Since 1999, I have been chairman of the European Parliament’s Tibet Intergroup. All those who have addressed us, and all those of our guests who know China well, leave us in no doubt that, where human rights are concerned, there has been hardly any progress. I am also thinking of Taiwan. For weeks, Peking has been threatening a military attack in the event of Taiwan deciding to hold a referendum on formal independence. I welcome the initiative taken by the Commission in scrutinising the planned sale of a German nuclear power station to China. (Applause) The export of usable goods is subject to the European Union’s approval; I am glad to see Mr Cohn-Bendit agreeing with me on this. Two things are necessary: one is that the Member States should maintain their restrictions on arms sales, and the other is that we should get to grips with the actual facts about the People’s Republic of China – at national level, at Community level and, it is to be hoped, eventually in early 2004, at the international level at the Human Rights Convention in Geneva. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, President-in-Office of the Council, ladies and gentlemen, in Ecofin’s deliberations, the intergovernmental method prevailed over the Community method with a purely laxist decision being taken to suspend the procedure, without, that is, placing precise conditions on the extension granted to the Federal Republic of Germany and France to achieve a balanced budget. This is very serious. This is a weighty precedent, which could benefit other countries in future and which, as Mr Prodi said, is detrimental to effective coordination, to the governance of economic and social policies on the basis of transparent, binding objectives, not just in terms of stability but also, and especially at this time, in terms of growth. This incident, however, only serves to highlight the shortcomings and contradictions that remain in the management of the Stability and Growth Pact, with the European Parliament still being excluded from any codecision procedure. This incident highlights the shortcomings in the actual wording of the Stability Pact, which is much more restrictive and mechanical than the text of the Treaty, not least as regards problems of flexibility. This means that the Union institutions, starting with the Commission, have to take two completely incompatible approaches in managing the two missions that the Union has given itself in the field of economic, social and environmental policy. I am referring to the Lisbon and Gothenburg strategies, the latter still without binding objectives, and to the Stability and Growth Pact. It is these serious shortcomings, which are also present in the Commission initiative, which explain why management which is flexible but not appropriate in terms of compliance with the objectives of the Stability and Growth Pact has been adopted, without the minimal but specific conditions being established that justify the length of time set for adjusting budgets. I am referring to the Lisbon strategy, to the binding objectives of the Lisbon strategy that need to be among the conditions to be fulfilled in the implementation of the Stability Pact. IN THE CHAIR: MRS CEDERSCHIÖLDVice-President

Political group: PSE
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, herbal medicinal products have been used throughout the world for many centuries. In Europe, too, consumers' interest has extended far beyond the household remedies which are customarily used in individual regions. Many people swear by these natural products, whether they are Chinese ginseng root or Indian tea tree oil. In the European Union, however, herbal medicinal products are not yet regulated on a uniform basis. In some Member States, they have to be authorised, whereas in others, facilitated evidence of efficacy is sufficient. Mr Nisticò has presented a very good report which creates broadly uniform provisions governing the manufacture, marketing and labelling of herbal medicinal products and sets high quality and safety standards. In this context, the following points are especially important. First of all, there is the issue of quality and safety. The manufacturers of herbal medicinal products must provide evidence of their safety in the same way as is required for chemical medicinal products. In the simplified authorisation procedure, the efficacy and harmlessness of a product are proven through its long, that is, traditional, use. We also need a new committee on herbal medicinal products within the European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products. This committee should take over responsibility for the full range of tasks relating to herbal medicinal products. It will establish herbal monographs relevant for the precise but speedy evaluation of the applications for authorisation. The proposal before us not only enables us to achieve broadly uniform authorisation criteria in Europe; it also allows us to facilitate the marketing of herbal medicinal products in all Member States while maintaining subsidiarity. European consumers can continue to choose from a broad range of products which have been submitted by the manufacturer in accordance with the legal provisions and have been carefully scrutinised and authorised by the authorities. This guarantees product quality and protects human health to the greatest possible extent.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, Commissioner, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the , I would firstly like to express our support for Mr Trentin’s report. It is a very well-produced report which has sought a consensus. We have been able to work together and the result will reflect the efforts we have made throughout its drawing up in committee. This report could not have come at a more appropriate time: the day after tomorrow the Barcelona European Council will take place and it will deal with issues relating to the assessment to be made and the commitments to be assumed in relation to the Lisbon process, as well as, clearly, a series of issues which the has always insisted on and which the Commissioner is sufficiently aware of and which I am not going to repeat: the need to liberalise the most protected sectors; the opening up of the markets; the emphasis on training and education: the provision of more resources for scientific research and technological development; that is, the fulfilment of the Lisbon objectives. We hope that clear progress will be made on this issue at this meeting in Barcelona. I would like to point out that the report by Mr Trentin does not exactly establish a social dimension, which is also included in the Lisbon objectives and that, unfortunately, they are not taken into account and, therefore, I believe that the demonstrations which have been organised against the Europe of capital – of this Europe which we are building and which is a reality – lack justification.

Political group: ELDR