Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, this is not the first time that we have dealt with the problem of organised crime in the European Union and there is a specific reason why we are doing so today in an urgent debate: the murder in Brindisi on 24 February of two officials of the Guardia di Finanza has again suddenly brought to light the danger faced by our colleagues in the security bodies of the Member States whose job is to protect the external borders of the European Union or work in regions which, because they are adjacent to the external borders of the European Union, are breeding grounds for organised crime. Our colleagues in the public police departments do not only deserve our full solidarity and respect; above all, we owe it to them to acknowledge once and for all that, wherever we live in the European Union, officials of the Guardia di Finanza in Apulia, for example, and I say this as a German member of parliament, are protecting the territory and the citizens of my country. I think that we in this European Parliament owe it to the relatives of the victims to acknowledge that respect for the dead is not an Italian but a European matter. That is the first point which I wished to make here. The second is a political challenge which, in my view, we are not taking seriously enough. We talk of the need to combat organised crime efficiently and yet we too frequently overlook the fact that the European internal market which we ourselves have created, with freedom of movement of services, capital, goods and persons, has created a huge free zone of economic activity in which, wherever legal transactions can be freely conducted, illegal transactions can also be freely conducted. In creating this huge legal economic area, we have also created a huge illegal economic area and it is now possible to operate on a large scale throughout the whole of Europe for the purposes of smuggling, trafficking in human beings, credit card fraud, drug trafficking, prostitution and every other possible form of serious crime. However, the police counter-strategies needed still mainly come within the jurisdiction of the nation states. The instruments to fight organised crime are organised at intergovernmental level. Where I live, in the district of Aachen, there is a town called Herzogenrath. The Netherlands are on one side of the street and Germany is on the other and if you rob a bank on the German side and escape to the Dutch side in time, then you are lucky because no German police is allowed to follow you. This is a practical example of the difficulties inherent in the fight against organised crime and clearly illustrates the need for a cross-border, or rather a pan-European approach. The point I wish to make is that, when it comes to serious crime which can only be combated at a pan-European level, the European Union needs independent operational powers for the European police agencies under the control of the European Parliament. I think that, as politicians in the Council, the Commission and Parliament, we owe it to those who fall victim to increasing organised crime to create the instruments needed to fight organised crime efficiently.

Political group: PSE