Mr President, honourable Members, this debate is about fighting crime – organised crime to be precise – which is now responsible for at least one in four of all crimes, and which makes huge profits from drug crimes, trafficking in human beings, insurance and credit card fraud, and from other activities. These ill-gotten gains are laundered and go into circulation in the legal economy. In so doing, they undermine our national economies, and in view of corruption, also erode our social systems and states. We therefore need to muster all our resources and bring all our strategies into play, so that we are appropriately equipped in our fight against organised crime. So we need these measures, and this proposed plan of action has special significance, because it sends out a signal to the people of Europe that Europe is not just an economic and currency union, but in the interests of its people and the Member States, it must also be built up into a union of security. An action plan of this kind will undoubtedly help to achieve this objective. But we must take the necessary European rules of the game into account when putting plans of this kind into practice. That is what happened with this action plan, and so I submitted a parliamentary question back in the spring, at the time of the Portuguese Presidency, which has applied itself very diligently to this issue, but has failed to play by the rules. Indeed the Presidency promised that Parliament would deal with the action plan, the opinion would be awaited and then incorporated into the action plan, and only then would the action plan be put into practice. The erstwhile Portuguese Presidency failed to keep its promise and this led to the question being asked that we are dealing with today. The criticism is justified, for more reason than one. Firstly, because the failure to involve Parliament has taken us a step backwards, not just to the days before the Treaty of Amsterdam, but long before the Treaty of Maastricht, because according to Chapter 6, Parliament must be involved in every case. But even the Treaty of Amsterdam demands openness and transparency and so, as a body representing the interests of the citizens, Parliament should have played a full part in the proceedings, as per the undertaking it received here from the Presidency at the beginning. Another broken promise. The question I would like to ask the French Presidency is how it intends to handle this, i.e. whether it will involve Parliament in the framing of long-term strategies, as provided for by the Treaty, await our opinion and then develop strategies that are in keeping with Parliament’s proposals. However, the action plan content has also been subject to criticism, which has to do with the fact that recommendations have been drafted and numbered from 1 to 5 in order of priority. Yet these lists of priorities have not been drawn up solely on the basis of urgency and absolute necessity, but very often, I regret to say, on the basis of feasibility, and I will give you an example. The freezing, or confiscation, of the ill-gotten gains of organised crime was only given a priority rating of 3, even though we all know that money is the driving force behind organised crime, and so the freezing, or confiscation, of these assets should have been given a priority rating of 1. There are other examples I could mention. I therefore call upon the French Council Presidency to rethink this list of priorities and to reorganise it in terms of real priorities, rather than ranking the objectives according to how difficult they will be to accomplish. We also feel that we need to develop preventive measures, and we have submitted concrete proposals to this end. They range from reviewing legislation in terms of the impact it has on preventing organised crime, to preventive measures aimed at deploying technical instruments too, with a view to nipping organised crime in the bud. For example, these include higher security standards for credit cards or electronic immobilisers for cars. So what we are talking about is a whole host of concrete proposals, and as a Parliament we are aiming firstly, to be fully involved in the process, and, secondly, for our proposals to be incorporated into the action plans, i.e. the long-term strategies.

Political group: PPE-DE