GwendalTsang/DEFT09-parquet huggingface dataset:
Thank you, Mr President. Commissioner, access to port services must be as open as possible, and a port must be able to operate as well as possible. This directive is one contribution, but we also need guidelines for government aid and a directive on transparent financial relationships between the port sector and the government. We are also rightly making rules that create a framework for the free circulation of services and we are rightly including specific aspects of ports. The trade unions are also right to point out to us the risks of ports of convenience, ports where all the social rules go overboard, just as there are flags of convenience, cheap flags, for ships. That is why we must impose requirements – social requirements too – on anyone wanting to offer services in a port. That is also why we propose introducing compulsory licensing for the provision of services in ports. That will enable aspects such as safety and the environment to be taken into account, as well as social rules and employment. The Prestige accident, an accident that once more focused our attention on the training and quality of ships’ crews, which we are also talking about here, had fortunately not yet happened at the time of the first reading. Since then we have also had a proposal from the International Maritime Organisation about safety on ships and in ports – in fact you are currently working on legislation on that. We must therefore know who is working in our ports and under what conditions. With a good licensing policy the competent authorities should be able to ensure that a port is not a place where you take risks with safety or with the environment, that a port is certainly not a place where you allow social dumping, but that a port is in fact a vital link in an efficient and sustainable European transport policy. That is something we urgently need.

Political group: ELDR
This resolution proposes to create a new budget to be used for combating mortality during pregnancy and childbirth in the poor countries of the world. We have supported this initiative in spite of its limitations. Indeed, this new budget item is not accompanied by new funding. The necessary money would be taken from the existing budget. We, for our part, ask that this aid be funded from the budget for aid paid to companies because, whatever the pretexts invoked for paying this, it is used not to preserve jobs, which continue to be destroyed on a huge scale throughout Europe, but, in reality, to put yet a little more money in the pockets of shareholders.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, even though the rapporteur has stated modestly that the report could have been better, I would still like to offer her my compliments. As has already been mentioned, the instrument of discharge is one of the most important weapons that Parliament has. It is therefore absolutely vital that we treat it with care. The Court of Auditors supplies reports and one of the most important recipients of these reports is Parliament. I therefore feel that Parliament would be well-advised to let the Court of Auditors know exactly what it expects from these reports. Also, a number of people have already said that we want concrete, succinct reports so that we know where we stand, and reports which are easy to read. We must name countries, specific cases and institutions; all these things would make it easier to understand. My group also thinks it is extremely important for there not just to be an SOA for the entire budget, but also one per sector. In the final analysis, we must be able to assess whether it is getting better or worse. I also think the idea mentioned in the report that members of the Court of Auditors should appear in the specialised committees of this Parliament, is an excellent one, because we cannot follow everything ourselves, instead, we must combine forces. As far as Parliament itself is concerned, the problem is the Treaty. The Treaty states that we can grant discharge but it does not say that we are entitled to refuse to grant discharge. I feel Parliament must sort this out. We must be able to do it ourselves, but I feel that refusal to grant discharge is an extremely important political matter. Indeed that is why it says in the report that if it should come to that, Parliament must immediately hold a debate on the political consequences thereof. Amendment No 8, tabled by the , states that it is important for the Committee on Constitutional Affairs to further elaborate the recommendations of the Morgan report so that they can be used.

Political group: ELDR
Mr President, you proposed a change to the agenda based on the Council’s availability, which, of course, we understand. Basically, your proposal is to take Mr MacCormick’s reports on the waiver of parliamentary immunity now and, whatever the quality of the work by the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market, which gave its opinion on the two reports last week, we believe that the time we have been given to examine the two requests for the waiver of parliamentary immunity might be insufficient. We also believe, in the interests of holding a good debate, in order for our parliamentary democracy and the essential procedure of parliamentary immunity to function properly, in order for us all to be able to give our honest opinion, having had the opportunity to examine all the documents and in order that we do not give poorly informed opinions, that it would have been better to place the two reports on the agenda of the Strasbourg part-session. I hope that the House can support us in this decision.

Political group: PSE
In Portugal, as in a number of countries in the European Union, industrial restructuring has often brought large-scale redundancies, greater job instability and huge economic and social costs, particularly for the countries and regions that are directly involved, thereby endangering their economic and social cohesion. In Portugal, just in the last few months, thousands of workers in various companies in the metallurgy, shipbuilding, electronics, footwear, textile and clothing industries have been threatened with redundancy and early retirement, or have been pressured into accepting voluntary redundancy. The specific companies involved are the Siderurgia Nacional group, the ABB group, Renault, Setenave and Lisnave, Indelma/Siemens, J.C.Clark and Vesticom. This extremely serious situation requires particular attention both on the part of Member State governments and of Community bodies, in order to amend their policies so that they give priority to, in particular, respect for workers’ rights, to high-quality employment and to the economic and social cohesion of the areas in which the companies wishing to close and/or relocate their production plants are based. Urgent progress also needs to be made in amending the existing directives in this field to make the position of workers’ representatives mandatory and binding with regard to collective redundancies in order to protect workers’ rights. This applies particularly to all processes of restructuring, mergers and relocations by companies and to the need to make Community and national aid dependent on long term commitments for employment and local and national development.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, an oral amendment will be tabled on this. It was submitted to Parliament’s services yesterday, and it is also included in the voting list. (As 32 or more Members objected, the oral amendment was not accepted)

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, I have no wish to punish anyone, so I shall come to the point fairly quickly. It is true that the European Union has finally overcome its reluctance to introduce European rules on combustion plants. The importance of these European rules lies very simply in the fact that we have a liberalised electricity market in the European Community, and it goes without saying that, in this liberalised market, standards for atmospheric pollution and the like should be comparable throughout Europe. The Commission has therefore reacted properly by focusing primarily on the old plants, for which there have regrettably been no rules since 1987 and which, to put it bluntly, have caused quite heavy pollution throughout Europe. I fully support the Commission’s activity in this area. I warmly welcome it, and I believe it represents a step in the right direction. Of course there is room for argument about whether particular exceptional arrangements can be extended for a year or two in the case of small power plants. That would not have posed us any problems in our quest for a compromise. The great pity is that we have not arrived at such a compromise. The approach is right. And anyone who thinks – and I wish to say this in spite of all the anger that has been voiced here – that environmental policies are a national responsibility is quite wrong, because most of the pollution emitted by these power stations ends up in the territory of our partners in Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway. I believe we are jointly and severally bound to find an answer. I believe we have found that answer and that we have also found ways of ensuring that special arrangements can be made for small plants for the next few years. I believe the rapporteur has presented a good report. We should continue along this path.

Political group: PPE-DE
I am very grateful to be able to follow my colleague, Philip Bushill-Matthews, because I share many of the concerns he has expressed. I think that this proposal reflects no credit on the European Union or on this House. I think if the European Union – and indeed if the European Parliament – wishes to be taken seriously by the people of Europe then this is exactly the sort of legislation which it should cease to enact because we all know that health and safety and workers’ safety is a priority for all Member States, and so it should be. But there is no justification for a Europe-wide standard on this issue. There can be no reason why Member States, acting in a uniform way, would necessarily be able to tackle this problem more effectively than individual Member States and, above all, there can be no reason for taking such a close interest in ordinary aspects of people’s working lives. It can make no sense to legislate on how Europeans are permitted to climb ladders. This should not be the priority for this House. It is too great a level of detail for this House to involve itself in and it will merely lead to the ridiculing of the European Union because this is just the sort of interference which is deeply unpopular with many citizens across the European Union. Instead of engaging in this sort of interference, we should be addressing those issues where it is constructive for Member States to work together and develop some common standards. A common and uniform and centralised standard on how you climb a ladder is not necessary and it is an undesirable interference with the way people run their work environment. We can trust the people of Europe to decide for themselves how they climb ladders. I believe that it is not necessary to conduct a risk assessment every time it is proposed to use a ladder. As anyone working in the home can tell you, ladders are used very commonly and very frequently and, yes, there are accidents but I do not believe this kind of directive will ever eliminate those accidents. All it will do is add yet another layer of European bureaucracy and red tape to be dealt with by a business community already suffocated by the weight of red tape. As my colleague has said, it is time for a change. It is time for this Parliament to start addressing the issues which are of concern to the citizens of Europe and to stop addressing itself to detailed questions where it can be of no assistance in actually securing worker protection. In fact, all it is doing is bringing itself and the European Union into disrepute and burdening European businesses with a layer of cost and bureaucracy that they can ill afford.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, I was present yesterday. I spoke in the plenary sitting, yet my name is not on the attendance register.

Political group: Verts-ALE
Mr President, this very day we are going to enthusiastically approve – and with great interest in my case – the reports on enlargement involving candidate countries such as the Czech Republic, which is the subject of Mr Jürgen Schröder’s report. However, I must express my concern – and I ask that the Presidency communicate this to the Prague authorities – at the fact that two young Spaniards, Gaizka Azcona Cueva, 22 years old, and Mikel Oliva Martínez, 21 years old, have been detained arbitrarily since last Tuesday – nearly ten days. It is worrying that this can happen in a country which is going to join the European Union.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Madam President, it was decided in Nice that accession negotiations must be completed by the end of the year so that, if required, the necessary codetermination rights can be exercised in the national parliaments in the course of 2003. In the complex documentation accompanying accession negotiations, the chapters on agriculture, finance and regional policy in particular have attracted a lot of public interest. People – by which I mean explicitly the citizens of the EU – are paying more attention to these things than ever before. At this point I would like to ask the Commission to give the Info-Points Europe, where they exist, more money so they can perform their current tasks. The present proposal to phase in direct aids to farmers by 2013 cannot be the last word. This model is not convincing because it lacks sufficient justification. The European reference yield, only 2.96 in Poland’s case for example, used as the basis for payment of direct aid is more than just an ugly detail. That is not the way to encourage viability and sustainability of agriculture in the candidate countries. My group believes that European agricultural policy cannot operate two policies in the long term. My group also wants to see the candidate countries’ integration into the common agricultural policy organised in tune with those countries’ specific macroeconomic trends with special attention paid to social needs. EU enlargement can be achieved only by the EU, the Member States and their regions working together. Development of the border regions is particularly important here. All involved must intensify their efforts, but they need the close attention of the European Union and the nation states. The current programme of economic development for the border regions, amounting to EUR 245 million, is not enough. Its availability is tied to other flows into and out of the regions, placing an even greater burden on already weak local authorities. But the EU budget is not under such pressure. If the Council Presidency under Spanish Chairmanship is unable to agree a final figure for direct agricultural aids – because of impending elections as, alas, in Germany – then the last few months will be spent trying to catch up, and in my opinion there will only be losers.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, we must safeguard the European economic and social model. We hear this from all quarters more than ever, certainly now that Europe is reunified and many people still feel somewhat ill at ease in our big House. The public appreciates the socio-ecologically corrected free-market economy. They know that competitiveness and solidarity are key concepts in this connection, and realise that the Lisbon process must be perpetuated and strengthened. I should like to make a plea for the little ones not to be overlooked in our future socio-economic policy. We must continue to work on a better entrepreneurial climate, in which more people feel inclined to set up a business and also have the opportunities to do so. We should in any case pay more attention to SMEs, because two-thirds of employment and added value are created by them. Why not, Commissioner, include a specific SME Commissioner in the next Commission with a horizontal competence and who, on that basis, would work with the different Commissioners in a matrix model in each of the vertical fields of competence? Finally, I think we should closely examine the proposal for the internal market directive and fine-tune it where necessary, to avoid having to throw away the baby with the bath water in the social sphere. I should like to say the following by way of conclusion. We are now reunited; there are 25 of us and together we will keep going. The ten new countries that have joined us have demonstrated to us that it is possible to make structural changes and that it is necessary to dare stick to one's guns in order to achieve the long-term goals of peace, prosperity and a good social climate. Let the journey they have travelled serve as an example to us and let us continue focusing on keeping the balance in Europe between the needs of a smoothly-running market and the wishes of the public.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, I honestly did not mean to allude to the Danish opt out, but the President-in-Office's reply means that, because the opt out also applies to common foreign policy and the euro, we may need, at some point, to invite the Greek representative to Question Time to the Council. I put it to you, Mr President, so that you can put it to the Bureau. Written questions, as Mr Haarder recommends, are not enough. They are all well and good but verbal questions have a charm of their own because they raise supplementary questions and answers. Is this perhaps something we should be looking at?

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, it is our opinion that one facet of the construction of Europe hinges on the construction of a common judicial system, for the Europe that we want to build, which comprises administrative law, civil law, both substantive and procedural, and criminal law, both substantive and procedural. The Convention on Mutual Assistance and Criminal Matters, which we are examining today, is but a stitch in the great fabric of the corpus iuris of Europe, which has its natural foundation in fundamental human rights and freedoms. Thus it is that legal cooperation and cooperation on criminal matters must also strictly respect fundamental rights, principles which lie at very root of our culture and our civilisation: I am thinking of fair trials, and more particularly of the rights of the defence, of the impartiality and integrity of judges, of the length of legal proceedings, for which my country, Italy, unfortunately has the worst record in terms of the number of sentences handed down, of the cases pending before the European Court of Human Rights. Restrictions on fundamental rights cannot and must not be applied to the field of law unless they are justified in that they are associated with an actual or presumed violation of criminal law. The report that the Committee on Citizens’ Freedoms and Rights has substantially amended with regard to its original formula, taking up many of the amendments we have presented, still leaves room for a certain confusion, in relation to the way in which the interception of telecommunications and video conferences are to be regulated. The news received in recent weeks on the way in which modern technologies facilitate interceptions mean that greater attention must be paid to this issue: we would not want our reality to be even more harsh and troubled than the dark scenes depicted by Orwell. This is only the beginning of a great project in the field of law, which should advance hand in hand with the growth the type of Europe we want to see.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, I was not aware of this incident. I am totally opposed to anyone at all threatening an invited Minister, even a Turkish one. Since we are talking about Turkey, however, I should like to point out that a Member of Parliament from my group, Mrs Uca, was representing my group until yesterday at the congress of one of Turkey’s Kurdish parties, HADEP. She was unfortunate enough to utter a few words in the Kurdish language before coming to her national tongue, which is German. The Turkish police force immediately prevented her from speaking not just in Kurdish, which in any case she had ceased to do, but even in German, and there had to be negotiations before she was able to pass on a message of greetings from my group in German. Virtually the same day, a leader from the Cypriot Parliament, who has, moreover, already visited the European Parliament, Mr Christou, was refused a Turkish visa even though he was travelling, if you can believe it, to a tripartite meeting in Istanbul between Turks, Greeks and Cypriots, in a totally peaceable context. I therefore urge you, Mr President, to please ask Mrs Fontaine, as President of Parliament, to send a letter to the Turkish authorities, certainly in order to apologise for this shabby treatment of one of their representatives but also to remind them that Members of the European Parliament or indeed members of the candidate countries travelling to their country should not be treated in this way. Hospitality over here and hospitality and respect over there.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, Commissioner, the recent release of Jean Bosco Barayagwiza by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has scandalised the government and population in Rwanda. Their anger is perfectly legitimate: the defendant was released on a technicality despite the extremely serious charges against him, charges of genocide. Going beyond this particular episode which the Rwandans see as traumatic, what is involved here is the culture of impunity. It must be clearly established that all those who committed crimes as heinous as genocide or crimes against humanity, or who were accomplices to these, will be pursued tirelessly. In order to do so, international institutions, and that includes ourselves, must provide the international courts with sufficient resources to accomplish its task. Would the European Union be prepared, Mr Lamy, to play a role in this regard, in order to, in future, prevent this type of blunder which is catastrophic in the opinion of the populations who are waiting for truth and justice? Finally, being particularly attentive, of course, to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, so that the duty to remember this conflict which already seems far off, some people think too far off, is maintained, it is the role of the European Union, I feel, to stand by the people of Rwanda on this occasion. A people that has today been truly betrayed by the release of Jean Bosco Barayagwiza, who was, need one be reminded, the founder of hate radio, the notorious Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM). The reaction of the Kigali authorities is understandable, but I invite them to resume their cooperation with the ICTR which is still, in spite of everything, the best instrument to establish justice and, hence, peace. It is essential for the international justice system to regain control if it wishes to ensure its own credibility, but we must also give it the resources it needs to fulfil its ambitions. This is the price of what we owe to the memory of the Rwandans.

Political group: ELDR