Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, Mr Wieland, this resolution of mine may not be as sexy as it could be, for justice is usually naked, or at least, attempts are made to strip it of its effectiveness. In reality, I see this motion for a resolution as being quite an effective, substantial initial step in that it is practical. In any case, I would like to start by making the point that the Member States, often out of a misconstrued sense of power, attempt to block what can appear to be a renunciation of sovereignty, particularly in the field of criminal justice. Therefore, combining Community sovereignty and the sovereignty of the Member States in this area is not easy. The mechanism for mutual evaluation by the Member States set forth in the 1997 Amsterdam Joint Action Plan, which – albeit somewhat behind schedule – has become operative, allows us to carry out the first stage. The first five countries have been selected: Denmark, Ireland, Greece, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, and a Committee of three experts has been set up. The group evaluating a country may not contain members who are nationals of that country and so the action is, so to speak, quite unrestricted. These initial assessments have revealed, first and foremost, that there is often a lot of political involvement in legal matters, particularly as regards requests for judicial cooperation on urgent measures, confiscation of property and searches, and this takes different forms, either involving the Ministry of Justice or different judicial authorities from that requesting assistance, etc. Of course, certain positive elements have also been noted, such as a computer system from the Netherlands known as KRIS, which has been used as a model. We are, of course, fighting extremely sophisticated organised criminal networks which use advanced technology. Methods change and so we also have to learn to deal with crime in different ways. The reports from Italy, Belgium, Spain and Finland are also ready, but as yet unofficially. However, we hope that there will be a monitoring system for the evaluation mechanism, to be the responsibility, in the long run, of the Court of Justice. Parliament has advocated this on several occasions too. In actual fact, in this regard, it is most important to stress that a number of approximation rules need to be proposed. I refer, for example, to dual criminality, which often holds up the ordinary, quicker passage of justice; I refer to the situation where a crime has been committed which is not a crime in the other Member States. For example, Luxembourg once refused to comply with the requests made by the judicial authority of another country because the act was not a crime under Luxemburgish law. There are therefore various impediments, and if we do not succeed in eliminating them, judicial cooperation will, in effect, be nothing but a word. Therefore, in order to make it effective, another resolution has already been prepared on the mutual recognition of final decisions. I have referred to it in this motion for a resolution as well in order to provide a mosaic, a complete raft of actions intended precisely to make this judicial cooperation more effective. We all realise the urgent need for an electronic register, a centralised documentation instrument recording at least the final decisions, at least within the Community framework. Clearly, it would be extremely useful to be able to quickly have the confirmation of final rulings against defendants or criminals who have already been convicted, at a wider level within Europe, but computerisation would already be a good basis – not necessarily on a huge scale – since information technology should now make it possible for us to achieve significant results quickly. The motion for a resolution calls for relatively rapid intervention by Eurojust – we have verified it on several occasions – and particularly by the so-called European Public Prosecutor who, at least on matters of serious crime – organised crime, telematic crime, white collar crime, Mafia crime, etc. – can effectively take the lead. We therefore call for cooperation from the judicial authorities, public prosecutors and judges of the different Member States as well, which will then become part of the European Public Prosecutor as support at the level of the different States. In short, it is a proposal supporting the European Judicial Network and what is known as ‘good practice’. I would stress this because, when all is said and done, common sense and good practice in applying the various procedures calls, first and foremost, for the direct transmission of requests between judicial authorities.

Political group: PPE-DE