GwendalTsang/DEFT09-parquet huggingface dataset:
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, thousands of women have petitioned Parliament to take a stand on the dangers inherent in the use of silicone breast implants. Breast implants are subject to the standard quality and safety requirements for medical devices, being covered – as you also mentioned, Commissioner – by Directive 93/42/EEC. It was lobbying from self-help groups of women suffering adverse effects from silicon-gel breast implants that prompted the Commission Communication. Silicon implants were used for years before there was regulation or surveillance of their use. The draftsman of the opinion of the Committee on Women's Rights and Equal Opportunities, my colleague, Mrs Ria Oomen-Ruijten, who unfortunately is unable to be here today, refers in particular to the need for open and transparent information about silicon implants. Public health and healthcare issues are for the most part the competence of the Member States. Together with Mrs Stihler, we now call on all of the Member States to introduce a national register including information about how medical aftercare is provided and how it is taken up. Personal privacy must be protected. Access to the registers will therefore have to be restricted and their contents treated as confidential. Best practice will have to be publicised and then applied Europe-wide. We need research and further development work to be carried out on safety and implant toleration. Here the introduction of a passport for implant recipients and compulsory aftercare examinations might also be helpful for gathering data. Accurate information must not be given in the form of advertising. Advertising will increase demand for implants. What is needed, however, is balanced information. Doctors and nurses – both male and female – have a particular responsibility here to provide patients with objective, complete and scientifically up-to-date information in writing about all the details of their implants, such as the identification number, volume and type. I should like to thank Mrs Stihler for her balanced report. Ladies and gentlemen, in my view, breast implants are also an integral part of health. They are needed to reconstruct breasts. Aesthetic reasons do often play a role, but if someone thinks that they are inferior then it is their general health that suffers. With the help of implants their sense of well-being can be restored.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, it has been one year since Johannesburg and eleven years since Rio de Janeiro. I was there. Environmental breakthroughs were achieved in Rio. The Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity were signed. Sadly, no consensus was reached in Rio regarding forests. Developing countries were fobbed off with the renewed pledge to increase funds for development aid to 0.7%, but ten years later in Johannesburg the contrary was seen: even less development aid. The Johannesburg Summit concerned itself more with the problems of poverty than those of the environment; and rightly so. 25 000 children are dying in our world every day. Fortunately, the Johannesburg Summit did not fail like the one in Cancún a week ago. Mr Davies has already touched on the point that the practical implementation leaves much to be desired, particularly regarding the European water and energy initiatives. Fortunately, however, a partial breakthrough was achieved in the field of energy for the first time. A coalition of the willing will now try to promote new, renewable energy. That is a good thing. The EU has to learn at world level what it is now doing internally, slowly and laboriously, in the Lisbon process. Progress has to be made with the economic, social and environmental circumstances at the same time. Improvements have to be made at the same time. We have not reached that point yet at world level. However, our Green motto is: trade, aid and firm agreements simultaneously. We want more fair trade; but that sadly failed in Cancún. More aid must also be given for clean water, sanitation and renewable energy sources for the more than one billion citizens of our world that are currently without them. New environmental agreements are also needed, particularly for sustainable forest management. We must not forget that. The path is long, but soft power will triumph.

Political group: Verts-ALE
Mr President, I admire Mr Deva's courage for tackling this subject. I have been working in developing countries for some twenty years myself, and I have to admit in all honesty that I have yet to discover how exactly one goes about developing a country. What works in one country does not in another. That is my conclusion in general. Mr Deva himself refers to eastern Asia, which has experienced a tremendous economic upturn. What strikes me is that this development has taken place without any major development aid, and that this took place when most markets in the world were still closed. How is this possible, and why does this not work elsewhere? As Mr Fernández Martín has already pointed out, the report, in my view, does not sufficiently highlight the fact that sound development requires sound government, and certainly not a corrupt government. Unfortunately, I come across these far too often in most countries. My group has tabled a few amendments at second reading. These amendments pertain to the following points. Firstly, we feel it is exaggerated to ban all exports of insecticides that are banned in Europe. Locust plagues in Africa can only be treated with pesticides that are banned in Europe, unless something new has come on the market in the last year, of which I am not aware. This is how it has always been. It is also exaggerated, in our view, to prescribe the same food safety requirements in Europe as in the developing countries. Needless to say, we will not be exporting any meat that is contaminated with dioxin or BSE. But food is in short supply and – as we say in Dutch – hunger is the best sauce. We will therefore need to make the necessary adjustments. I do want to confirm that our group is completely behind the Doha Declaration, and I am pleased that the Commission has reiterated this. Regrettably, the resolution does not mention the importance of a good price for agricultural products. As far as trade is concerned, I do not know whether Mr Deva has read the article in The Economist a few weeks ago, which clearly stated that the trade barriers among the developing countries are much higher than those with the rich countries. He partly refers to this in the resolution, but this should, to my mind, be emphasised. It would be perfect if we could blame the use of guns and pistols on those who manufacture them, but it seems a little idealistic to me. We regret that none of the amendments tabled by our group were adopted because there happen to be new rules. This is one of the reasons why my group will largely be abstaining from the vote on this resolution.

Political group: ELDR
Mr President, I am totally opposed to what is happening here in Parliament. More and more often, over the past few part-sessions, steps have been taken to try to postpone votes scheduled for the five days of our part-session for reasons relating to personal problems, attendance, etc. I think our Parliament brings discredit upon itself by taking decisions of that kind. (Applause)

Political group: PSE
Mr President, I think there are more fundamental questions to be asked following on from what our colleague said. If you look at the total amount of debating time that we had at September I and II and the fact that we are finishing now, the question is why did we need to have two sittings in September at all? It simply is not necessary with the new Rules. I would ask you Mr President to take back to the Bureau that we are already seeing the highly desirable impact of the Corbett report on the Rules changes. We need to evaluate how many weeks we need to be working here, because, President, we are desperately short of committee time in this Parliament. We have a ludicrously small amount of committee time between now and Christmas to deal ... (Protests from Mr Posselt) It is true Mr. Posselt, and I will show you the agenda for my committee. We have a ridiculously small amount of committee time, and we should not be wasting time sitting around here waiting for something to happen, when we could be doing serious political work in Brussels in committee. Contrary to what Mr. Schulz is saying a true democratic Parliament would have a serious look at its workload and – I thank you for the interruption Mr Posselt – I believe there are many people who agree with me. Most of them have gone already, because they do not want to waste their time here on Thursday afternoon.

Political group: PPE-DE
Madam President, I do not know if you are aware of it, but this is an historic moment in the budgetary procedure of the European Union. For the first time, each of the three institutions is represented here by a woman.

Political group: PSE
In this report, we voted in favour of the paragraphs which contributed towards protecting the working women, both in terms of their health and wages and in terms of children’s health. It is, however, to be deplored that the report does not even propose to bring the advantages and rights into line with the countries where these are most favourable to pregnant women in work. Moreover, we should not like our vote in favour of the specific protection of women night-workers during pregnancy to be interpreted as legitimising women’s working night shifts. Quite the contrary, we wish to restate our opposition to night work, if it is not socially useful, not just for women, but also for men. The prohibition of night work for women is a right acquired by the working movement in France. To revoke this would be a retrograde step in social terms. To speak of equality between men and women is hypocrisy. This hypocrisy is intended to conceal the fact that the legislator is more concerned to reassure employers that their factories may be operated profitably than to guarantee the health and safety of employees.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, India is a State whose independence and foundation in the middle of the last century was possible based on a mass and globally respected social mobilisation, which was built on a doctrine of passive resistance as a political resource. Mahatma Gandhi led the Indians with a message of non violence, tolerance, and overcoming religious differences, in an epic campaign that has remained among the most symbolic victories of peaceful methods in politics, as it established the most populated democracy in the world and a society considered to be a model of co-existence of races, languages and, in short, of civilisations. However, conflicts based on religious fanaticism have never stopped occurring in India. Although one of the most significant victims of those conflicts was Gandhi himself, the list continued with other assassinations, such as that of the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, her son, also Prime Minister, and others. And as well as those people whom we know as important figures, thousands of innocent people have fallen victim to intransigence and fanaticism. It is a paradox that it is precisely where the material and social needs are greatest that religious extremism and intolerance arises and builds up. We are talking about a country where the inequalities are devastating and where the physical environment and natural disasters often make life even more difficult for the people, and it is there that conflicts between the followers of majority beliefs and other smaller communities have permanently marked and tarnished the history of the greatest democracy in the world. The international community must ask the Government of India to guarantee the safety of its people with the same amount of effort that it is making with other challenges of development in which it is achieving significant success. The Indian Government must maintain its efforts by dedicating sufficient resources to enable people who have been displaced to return to their place of origin and to re-establish harmony in Gujarat and other areas affected by the recent clashes that led to our debate, and they must also purge the cases of collusion by the security forces in episodes of religious and political violence. The European Union must support these efforts and urgently send as much aid as possible to the area.

Political group: PSE
Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, cooperating with South Africa and helping it to put its under-development behind it should be a fundamental duty for Europe, whose ruling classes greatly benefited in the past from the pillage of that country’s mineral wealth and from the exploitation of its poverty-stricken masses. I will certainly not join the European institutions in their displays of self-satisfaction as they have even had the effrontery to claim that they contributed significantly to the defeat of the apartheid regime in South Africa, whilst in fact, the great powers, including European ones, were overwhelmingly responsible for keeping a notorious regime in power for such a long time. It was the struggle of the black masses which put an end to institutionalised segregation, but unfortunately, they have not been able to end the social segregation which causes that country’s workers and the unemployed to continue living in poverty. The only thing that the European institutions are offering South Africa in terms of cooperation is a trade agreement, carefully negotiated so that it favours European business and industrial interests, an agreement which, in South Africa, will only profit the tiny minority of exporters of precious stones and agricultural produce, who were already the main beneficiaries of apartheid. Moreover, the signatories to the agreement make no secret of this and say that, I quote, “The measures on cooperation aim to facilitate the re-structuring and modernisation of South African industry and to stimulate its competitiveness.” Well, workers of any country will have understood that this means redundancies and greater unemployment! Our solidarity goes out then to South Africa’s workers, to its underprivileged people and not to those, whether over there or in Europe, who enrich themselves as a result of these people’s poverty.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, a further personal statement. I do not believe Mrs Fontaine needs lessons in parliamentary law to know what to do. I refer to the letter that I sent to the President yesterday. The agencies are not the source of the information, but rather the text of the letter that I sent to Mrs Fontaine to ask her if she thought it appropriate to intervene following certain statements made in this House by the President of the Socialist Group, Mr Barón Crespo and other members of the same Group. I do not think I mentioned Mrs Napoletano in the letter, but I do not mind contesting some of her statements. The problem is not one of interference of the European Parliament in the Italian Parliament; it is that yesterday and the day before, that is since the beginning of this part-session, we have heard statements repeated in this House that interfere with the Italian Parliament. Indeed, when someone asks repeatedly to check whether the laws that are passed are in accordance with the decisions of the Council of Ministers, and nobody questions the assessment of that Council, I repeat and continue to repeat, and I said so yesterday to Mrs Napoletano and the Socialist Group, who had spoken on an issue that concerns Italy’s internal affairs – the Italian Parliament, thank God, is still sovereign and must not be subjected to guardianship – that, in connection with the rules on international letters rogatory, the issue in question is about a verification of a law ratifying the agreement between Italy and Switzerland, and the basic law is that which implements Article 3 of the European Convention on Legal Assistance signed in Strasbourg by all the European countries and which has been in force in Italy since 1961. Article 3 lays down the obligation of the country that receives a letter rogatory asking for legal assistance to send the petitioning country the originals of the documents having evidential value or, failing that, a copy with a certificate of authenticity. This is not a matter of failing to combat terrorism: we have always been, as a political grouping and as the national government, the expression of this political movement with its Prime Minister strongly committed to fighting terrorism. I would not like it to be said, wrongly, in this House, that the law being adopted implementing Article 3 of the European Convention on Legal Assistance, which has all too often been violated by magistrates in Italy, is actually a law favouring terrorism, because it is not. Hence my request for Mrs Fontaine’s intervention, if she thinks fit.

Political group: PPE-DE
I would like to concentrate on an important amendment which has been mentioned in this debate, namely Amendment No 19 on the conformity and control of transitory contamination. It is critical for me as a Scottish representative in the House. In south-west Scotland, the Irvine and Aire river valleys are particularly susceptible during times of heavy rainfall – in flash floods during the summer months, for example – to failing to meet the micro-biological standards for good quality during those few, rare days. This does not mean that beaches in Britain are hotbeds of pollution. It means we need flexibility in measuring and sampling to deal with these natural occurrences. Amendment No 19 introduces a two-part system of management action. Its purpose is to bring the Commission's proposal into line with the approach adopted in World Health Organisation guidelines for recreational use. The guidelines acknowledge that the tighter standards proposed by the WHO would be breached under some circumstances, i.e. heavy rainfall, and include an allowance to discount samples during these periods, provided that management measures are in place to protect bathers. The amendment encourages authorities to take preventive action where possible to protect bathers from exposure to pollution. The Council of European Municipalities and Regions has also backed Amendment No 19, and local government wants to see bathing water quality improve by introducing more flexibility into bathing water rules.

Political group: PSE
Mr President, I should like to express my thanks to the Commissioner for her extensive explanation. I fully share much of what she says. Like her, I believe that dialogue is necessary and that the directives concerning workers’ rights and European works councils should be implemented. You will, however, understand my concern when I tell you that I live in Asturias. Asturias is a region that has undergone restructuring in coal, in mining, in arms manufacturing and in shipbuilding. There have been dialogues and agreements with the workers, and there have been retirements and early retirements, which is what one of the chairmen of these three companies that we are talking about today is proposing for the Charleroi steelworks, for instance, which seems to be one of the first that will close. My specific question, Commissioner, which probably already has an answer, is this: given that the Lisbon agreements talked about full employment, is it not awful to use public funds to create jobs in this way while continually losing jobs through company restructuring, privatisations and mergers? The problem in Asturias, where there have been retirements and early retirements, is that young people today have no prospects because more than 30 000 jobs have been lost.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, those involved in the construction of Europe have always been prepared to take risks. This has certainly been the case as far as the protection of the Community’s financial interests is concerned. Parliament, notably its Committee on Budgetary Control, has indeed taken risks. We should pay tribute to the determination shown by Mrs Theato who chairs that Committee and is one of the rapporteurs. Whatever is achieved in this field will be largely due to her efforts. Having said that, I must admit that along with many other Members I share the Commission’s concern. We need to work towards creating an area of justice, but we must do so in a responsible manner. Throughout the whole process of the construction of Europe, the forces attempting to hinder it have consistently taken advantage of the mistakes made by more enthusiastic individuals when they lose sight of the Treaty. This is why I am bringing a critical note into today’s debate. I do not wish to argue against the concept of a European Public Prosecutor, but I am concerned about laying down the details of the necessary statute. It is indeed a transitional statute but a statute nonetheless. The House needs to give due consideration to this office. Not only should the Committee on Budgetary Control give it due consideration, but so should the House itself. Such consideration should also involve dialogue with other institutions, notably the Commission. Not until that has taken place will we be in a position to move forward together and present a proposal consistent with the Treaty. The same applies, in my view, to the Commissioner’s comments on the rapporteur’s idea of resorting to a regulation in place of a directive. That is not within Parliament’s competence. It falls within the competence of our societies and of states governed by the rule of law. Only in very specific circumstances may direct obligations be imposed on citizens from a Community level. This is why I have ventured to voice some criticism here today, Mr President. I am, however, full of admiration for the work completed.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, expenditure for research accounts for nearly two thirds of the budget for internal policy. Consequently, the Committee on Industry, External Trade, Research and Energy has requested the Court of Auditors to carry out a thorough investigation into the legality and lawfulness of payments in research as a matter of high priority. The Committee on Industry, External Trade, Research and Energy regrets the inaccuracies in one third of payments. The European Commission has paid over the odds most of the time because the beneficiaries had failed to declare non-eligible costs. Inadequate inspection by the offices of the Commission and the lack of contractually determined penalties for excessive declarations have also led to deliberate over-invoicing in nearly two-thirds of the payments. What does the Commissioner intend to do about this? Has the Commission ever taken legal action? Or does it intend to? I would like to have these questions answered. The success and usefulness of the research programmes are beyond dispute. But effective implementation requires better management and coordination, as well as inspections carried out by various Directorates-General. According to the Committee on Industry, External Trade, Research and Energy, it is essential that the tasks pertaining to financial management be carried out by officials who are required to render full account of their tasks to the institution. If money from Brussels is spent, then the responsibility should lie with Brussels and not with external service providers. We are prepared to grant discharge under these conditions.

Political group: ELDR
I will be brief. I want to welcome the announcement by the Commissioner. We will have to wait and see how it actually works in practice. The companies we are dealing with here are quite powerful. Does the Commissioner have an understanding with Member States that they will not top up their vehicle taxation as a means of recovering income lost as a result of lower prices, thereby wiping out the economic benefit to consumers? In addition, would it be possible to make displaying or advertising pre-tax prices along with post-tax prices obligatory? Generally we have post-tax prices advertised. Finally, what impact, if any, would this have on guaranteeing on a Europe-wide basis the car which may be bought in another state?

Political group: PSE