GwendalTsang/DEFT09-parquet huggingface dataset:
Mr President, in Belarus, the Christian Democrat parliamentarians Andrey Klimov and Vladimir Kudinov have disappeared without trace. What has happened to these colleagues of ours? One contributory and forward-looking feature of this report is the fact that it acknowledges the role not only of political decisions but also of civil society in creating an environment where human rights have the profound and enduring support of the people. The value of this insight cannot be underestimated. The right to life and respect for its inviolability are the basic human rights and therefore both the essence and goal of democracy. At the same time, they express the Christian view of human life which, for two thousand years, has formed a precious part of Europe’s cultural and spiritual heritage and which, as we confront the new millennium, is a valuable asset for Europe to further build upon in the struggle for human rights. The fact that the European Union has now started preparing annual reports on the ways in which human rights are respected within and outside the EU’s Member States is something which we Swedish warmly welcome. With the right to life as its theme, the EU should continue to maintain a consistent line on the death penalty and, especially via the United Nations, to challenge those countries which consider it to be ethically and morally acceptable to defend the State’s right to take another person’s life. In the pressing work of extending the EU eastwards, demands for a moratorium on, and future abolition of, the death penalty have, in our own part of the world too, influenced ethical thinking and legislation in the direction of affirming human life. The present report illuminates the frightening developments affecting the smallest among us, who are also those most precious to us, representing our own future, namely our children. The fact that one million children on this earth work as prostitutes at the same time as dark forces disseminate child pornography is deeply alarming and causes a vast amount of bitterness. On the basis of the right which children have to a father and mother and to secure conditions in which to grow up in a family environment, it is our common challenge, in the face of the new millennium, to allow children’s needs to be our guide in all the work that is done in society.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, on a point of order. I was just wondering whether anybody is going to inform the particles of smoke where the smoking zone and the no-smoking zones are.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, rapporteurs, like the previous speakers, I believe it is essential to have a legal basis which provides us with a stable budget for European youth, culture and education programmes. These programmes, which naturally the European Commission, Parliament and Council must be involved in, must have, firstly, the relevant legal basis, and that is moving in the right direction and, secondly, an adequate budget. And that is what we in the European institutions must do next in relation to European youth, education and culture. I have often said in this House, and I will not tire of doing so, and today I am going to say it again, that the future of Europe lies in its youth. It cannot be any other way. And the future of Europe is going to depend very much on the education received by these young people. Although in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity education is not our responsibility, we can make a great and very positive contribution to the creation of a more united, knowledgeable, cohesive, cultured and educated Europe; this is what we all want. In the end this will benefit all Europeans. I would therefore ask that, when we have finished the battle over the legal basis, amongst all of us we begin the battle to increase the budgets for youth, culture and education until they receive the sums they truly deserve, because that will benefit all of us.

Political group: PPE-DE
This is a report of a theoretical, conceptual, and even ideological nature. Reading the explanatory statement gives one the impression that we are living in an idyllic world. This world can be divided into ‘donors’ and beneficiaries of the philanthropy of these ‘donors’. Nevertheless, the ‘donors’ should be accountable to their taxpayers, which would impose conditions – and rightly so – on their capacity to provide aid. This is why in this world, there is a real need to ensure that this aid is not misused and why the concept of ‘good governance’ was introduced by the World Bank in 1991, with a definition of its main aspects. Both the Commission communication and the critical assessment made in this report (extending the idea beyond the sphere of the State, which is seen simply as the ‘supplier’ to ‘civil society’), consider ‘good governance’ to be a terminological concept which is more pragmatic than that of democracy, for example, and that this concept should underpin the EU’s development policy. The real world is far from idyllic, however. There are opposing interests in conflict with one another, and no amount of ‘good governance’ can conceal the scant importance attached to cooperation in the entire range of Community policies, the absence of any concept of solidarity or respect for what is ‘different’, and the constant presence of conditionality, which imposes economic and social models. We therefore feel that this report is dangerous, because it portrays the world as those acting in good faith would like it to be or could be and not as it is.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, in one way it is a good thing that the public in the 15 European states does not take too much notice of what we are doing, especially on evenings such as this where you, Mr President, the Commissioner, seven members and roughly the same number of officials must stand by our posts. This is an issue which is seemingly unimportant but which in fact affects several million companies – I myself am a small businessman – and tens of millions of consumers. There is a proverb in Italian: Non e mai troppo tarde – it is never too late! But it is too late for many small and medium-sized enterprises, family businesses and young entrepreneurs. And many companies will not survive the delay before what we will hopefully decide by a large majority tomorrow is actually transposed into law. Unfortunately they will no longer be able to take a positive view, as entrepreneurs, of this positive step in the right direction. It will help SMEs, bring greater legal certainty and improve property rights; in the final analysis it is an employment programme, providing help for young enterprises and family businesses but also protection for the consumer. I think that this aspect cannot be stressed enough. All that is left is for me to thank all those involved, who have striven over the years to achieve this result. I hope that the intended beneficiaries will indeed be able to reap the benefits of it as quickly as possible. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, Mr van Hulten, your work is worthy of being qualified as enterprising, arduous and complex, and I believe this is important in a first report. Please therefore accept what I am about to say as being criticism made in the spirit of honest debate, and I believe that in this way our debate here today will be richer. This report seems to me to be redundant, long-winded, confused and lacking in accuracy in the terms used. Perhaps ‘redundant’ is the most serious epithet, and you are not responsible for this. It is the responsibility of this Parliament. That is to say, if this Parliament commissions a Committee of Experts – and I am not going to repeat what Mr Casaca has said, but I agree with him to a large extent – to analyse a problem, where is the sense in indulging in the medieval tradition of criticising the critics and so on, ad infinitum. Clearly we are awaiting this reform from the Commission, we are awaiting the proposals which the Commission is going to make to us and this Parliament will have to express its opinion on them. Meanwhile, we have to offer the Commission a vote of confidence. ‘Long-winded’. I am not going to mention the length of this report. I do not know if it breaks the record for all the resolutions presented here, but, for this type of resolution it certainly does. I do not believe that there has ever been a resolution – and in this Parliament we certainly produce complex resolutions – which has had paragraphs of more than 16 lines without a single full stop. It is also ‘confusing’. I am not going to return to what has been said about the analysis of questions concerning Parliament. That should be the subject of another report and we will have to carry one out and consider that issue, but not in this report. And finally, Mr President, frankly, I am not going to give examples, but there are many cases in which legal language is used with an alarming lack of accuracy. Therefore – in summary – I await, and many of us await, your report, Commissioner Kinnock, so that we can really express our opinion on it, which is the duty of this Parliament.

Political group: PPE-DE
I should like to endorse Mr Lagendijk’s question. I understand perfectly well what the Commission is doing and also what priority it wants to give its policy with regard to the countries around us. In this Parliament we shall be returning in detail to the announcement that the Commission is making today. I really only have one question. The objective of course is to prevent the creation of a new divide, a new Iron Curtain, in Europe. If this is what we want to prevent, then we are going to have to help countries such as Ukraine or Belarus to undergo the same development as countries such as Hungary or Poland. Does the Commission think it will be able to develop sufficient influence on and cooperation with these countries with its proposal, so that the same reform processes take place there as in the present candidate countries and in time a kind of equality will develop that opens the way to answering the question as to whether these countries can also become members of the Union? For me, what it comes down to in the end is whether, by means of what you are proposing, we can achieve the same positive effect on those countries as we have achieved with the enlargement process in a number of other countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Given what is currently happening in those countries, I think that this is the only way to prevent a new divide in Europe.

Political group: PSE
Mr President, even if Doctor Hachem Aghajari does not receive the death penalty, Iran nonetheless remains condemned to domination by its ultra-conservative religious leaders. The success of the student demonstrations cannot conceal the fact that the human rights situation has not improved but has, in fact, deteriorated. The stoning of women, public hanging, torture and other barbaric practices mean that Iran still does not fulfil the elementary demands of civilisation. It is therefore astonishing that the European Union has not tabled a resolution concerning the situation in Iran in the UN General Assembly Third Committee. Many Member States say that they have high expectations of the human rights dialogue but, in reality, instead have high expectations of their lucrative business interests. The European Union must not let itself be taken for a ride. On the day before the European delegation of negotiators arrived in Teheran, five people were publicly hanged. The dialogue must not be a reason for failing to put the human rights situation in Iran on the agenda in international fora. That is why, in the spring, the European Union must submit a resolution to the Commission on Human Rights in Geneva. Naturally, it is important not to isolate Iran. Contacts must be established, but good use must be made of these, and the reformers must be given as much support as possible. A political dialogue clause in a future agreement is not enough. In my group’s judgment, no cooperation agreement can be concluded as long as there is still gross and systematic abuse of human rights. Aid to terrorist organisations is also an obstacle to such cooperation. The situation in the country is becoming more explosive by the day, and it is therefore also high time that there were genuine reforms in Iran. There can only be constructive dealings with Iran if the truth is allowed to prevail and if supreme authority lies with the people.

Political group: ELDR
Mr President, I join the general congratulations to Mrs González Álvarez who has been a sympathetic and inclusive rapporteur. She may occasionally have found the eccentricities of British car boot sales hard to follow but that, too, came within the remit of her personal charity. This directive should be welcomed by the whole House and the issue of general product safety and its extension is something which must be commended. In the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy, under the wise guidance of our rapporteur, we passed a series of amendments which, again, my group would commend en bloc to the House today. We are less happy with some of the later ones. We have heard the justifications for them and for the reprise of the industrial arguments which we heard in committee. We remain unpersuaded and we will vote against most of them. Perhaps before the vote, Mrs Lulling or one of her colleagues, will tell us what the exact wording, particularly in the English version, of Amendment No 42, is. We could support it if the wording was 'installation and maintenance' and not 'installation as maintenance'. I am sure this is an error and if this can be confirmed, we will support it. This proposal includes some extremely valuable general principles including the one which the other side of the Chamber appears to find offensive. That is the principle that we do not export products that we believe are unsafe for our own people in the European Union. Increasingly, as world trade develops, we are faced with this problem and we have to tackle it and not back away on the grounds that somehow the rest of the world does not matter, whether it is the safety of its health, its foodstuffs or the product which we export to it. We have to look now at the links between products and services. The Commission have begun to take a tentative but welcome step in that direction and perhaps the Commissioner will say more about that when he replies. Finally, I would like to say a word about charity shops and car boot sales and all those other exchanges of donated and individual second-hand goods. The charity shops welcome the general protection of this directive. But they need an exemption from the obligation under Article 2 to provide information that they simply do not have. Our Amendments Nos 1, 8 and 18 bear on that point. I hope it will be possible for the House to support these because it cannot be anybody's intention to see these valuable and usually non-profitable charitable activities effectively driven out by an information provision which should relate to mainline manufacturers and to new or well attested products. Provided the vendor can always inform the buyer of the nature of the goods and the limitations on the information that should be sufficient.

Political group: PSE
Mr President, of course this is a group decision. We held a brief discussion on this matter this evening, at 6.00 p.m. on the dot.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, I must begin by explaining that I have no association at all with Edinburgh University, but I think that it is important to stress their bona fides. It is, after all, one of my own country’s most distinguished universities. When they sought and obtained this patent, which they did for entirely lawful purposes, they did so in good faith. They have no interest in cloning humans: rather what they are interested in is being able to work on human tissue to help find remedies for, for example, Alzheimer’s Disease and leukaemia and what they are doing breaks no law in the United Kingdom. As has been explained, the patent in question was examined prior to the coming into effect of the 1998 directive in September 1999, but it was issued after that date and, as has been said, a mistake was made in the form in which it was granted. I have seen no evidence at all at this stage of anything more than error on the part of the Patent Office. Of course, I would like to add that that is something which is of serious concern. But until there is something more, I think it appropriate that the wilder claims and suggestions should be ignored. My understanding is that the patent error can be corrected either by the patent owner applying to correct the document or by a third party filing an opposition which I understand has already been done. I have been told by the university’s advisors that it will not resist so long as the disclaimer which may be added to the patent continues to allow them to carry out their lawful work on human tissue. In other words, what we are talking about here is an amendment to cut out the offending elements of the patent, thereby rendering it lawful, and not its revocation in its entirety. I believe that the work which is being carried out in Edinburgh is not permitted by national law in some other Member States. But what this Parliament and the Community institutions and international bodies should not do is attempt to legislate for national parliaments in areas which are national competences, and in my view any attempt to do so should be resisted strongly as a matter of overriding constitutional principle.

Political group: PPE-DE
Madam President, I should like to get straight to the point: although today’s discussion should remain focused on the issue of the recent elections in Pakistan, it is clearly a time to assess the entire process of transition to democracy in that major south Asian country. It is also clear that, now more than ever, international relations at various levels, including the economic and commercial levels, must involve honouring commitments that have been given and the careful management of expectations. We all welcomed the support given by the President of Pakistan to the fight against terrorism, which has helped to soften an extremely negative image created by the military coup that removed the elected government led by Nawaz Sharif. We also know that it is impossible to speak of consolidated democracy whilst the military is interfering in the political arena; but we also know from various examples in southern European and Latin American countries, that it is possible to start a process of transition to democracy by making a pact with civilian political representatives, provided that the various phases and arrangements agreed on are respected. It is precisely the respect for these requirements that, in the period of transition to democracy, provides the necessary if insufficient legitimacy for the military to continue in some political role. This is precisely where our main concerns lie. In August 2001, the Pakistani president announced the road map for democracy, which included the elections due to take place on 10 October. This was an historic moment. In the end, however, we are sorry to say that this opportunity was largely wasted. We do not wish to issue any kind of judgment on the process of transition to democracy in Pakistan but we can say that this a poor way of promoting it and we hope that the elected members will have the clear-mindedness, the political ability and the courage necessary to lead a new phase of genuine transition to a democratic political power.

Political group: PSE
Mr President, I welcome this directive and thank the rapporteur for his hard work. This will mean that electric and electronic waste will have to be collected and recycled instead of dumped – as in my own country – with negative effects on the environment. Producers need to be responsible for their own products to ensure that future products live up to a more environmentally responsible design. For example, the insides of televisions can now be made completely of plastic instead of plastic and metal, making them easier to recycle. Such producers should be rewarded for designing to reduce waste at competitive prices. Consumers need to be involved in this process in order for the directive to be a success. Easy access to collection systems is absolutely essential and consumers must be able to return products free of charge. Making producers responsible for their own brand products will lead to improvements of design and have a direct effect on the costs. The loosely-framed common position must be tightened up to discourage free-riders who do not take responsibility for their own waste. Here I welcome the amendment on orphan waste products. Finally, it is vital to have comparable rules implemented in all Member States. Otherwise we will simply have chaos.

Political group: Verts-ALE
Mr President, the organisation of the working hours of road transport workers affects the working conditions of these workers and also the efficiency of logistics. The area of application of the directive is the most essential question in this whole matter. The compromise achieved in the Council leaves self-employed hauliers outside the scope of the directive. In my opinion Parliament should also approve this compromise. Self-employed hauliers must not be subjected to artificial regulations limiting their total working hours. This would lead to an increase in bureaucracy and make it more difficult for small businesses to operate. It would also interfere with self-employed people’s use of their free time in a way which would be impossible to monitor. The issue has no bearing on road safety because the driving time of independent self-employed hauliers is already regulated under other rules. Secondly, I would like to mention the further limitation of working hours in terms of night work. This would increase traffic jams, weaken road safety and increase costs.

Political group: ELDR
We take the view that the restructuring of the defence industry should not be motivated by the political ambition to create a common defence policy, but by the strategic and industrial requirements of the major companies and Member States involved. On this basis, link-ups between European and North American companies are as much to be welcomed as between European companies. While we can support a code of conduct which sets out a level playing field with a set of rules to which we can all voluntarily adhere, we do not wish to encumber industry with more unnecessary regulations. In particular, we do not support the proposal, in Paragraph 9 of the resolution, that the code of conduct should be made legally binding. Our objections to this are four-fold: the possibility of yet another range of activities being justiciable in the European Court of Justice is opened up; the possibility of obtaining agreement by other arms exporting countries outside the EU to an international code of conduct will be that much more difficult and unattractive if it is legally binding; if legal sanctions are involved there is a danger that some of those involved in the arms trade will be less open in their activities; there may be reluctance by some countries to place arms orders with European states which are encumbered by legislation, particularly when a long-term after-sales support relationship may be involved. While there is much that we can agree with in this resolution there are a number of fundamental flaws and this is why we have abstained in our vote. - Report Angelilli (A5-0258/2000)

Political group: PPE-DE