GwendalTsang/DEFT09-parquet huggingface dataset:
Mr President, Madam President-in-Office of the Council, Mr President of the Commission, I would also like to express my satisfaction with the strategy, which is generally sensible and coherent as far as enlargement is concerned. However, although this vision, which is held both by the Council and the Commission on the issue of enlargement, may be ambitious, the same cannot be said about the content of the forthcoming IGC. In fact, what we have on the table now is merely a continuation of what could not be achieved in Amsterdam. I would say there is “plenty of ambition for enlargement and yet very little ambition for a revision of the Treaty of the Union itself”. There is even greater cause for concern when what we want to revise, that is the famous institutional triangle, is defended on the basis of an argument for efficiency and not on the basis of an overall vision of the European project. I do not think that anyone will be happy if the Intergovernmental Conference at the end of 2000 results in the Commission or the Council taking decisions in two hours which they previously took in five, six or seven. The project of European construction does not rest on the criterion of efficiency but on the criterion of cohesion and what we all hope is that, in Helsinki, a political agenda is set, and not a technical agenda with complicated political consequences. In this regard, I would like to welcome the Portuguese Presidency’s willingness to grant the European Parliament’s representatives at this IGC the same status that will be given to the Commission as far as the personal representatives of the Ministers for Foreign Affairs are concerned. It also appears important that we take advantage of the Portuguese Presidency’s willingness to have the IGC start not in March but, if possible, as early as January. As for the Charter of Fundamental Rights, it is important that it is able not only to extend the rights that are already laid down in Charters and Treaties but also that it recognises rights in the social and economic spheres and, above all, that it is able to be innovative and creative in the area of new rights concerning environmental issues and the protection of consumer rights. I shall now address a third point to which President Barón Crespo has already referred, concerning employment issues. The Union cannot only attempt to deal with employment issues when we are going through periods of economic slowdown. Our policies should be active, not reactive. We must take advantage of the current economic cycle and of the declaration that the Finnish Presidency will be making on the Millennium and the new information society, so that we find a creative way of recording sustained growth and so that the goal of full employment is actually achieved and does not remain a rhetorical phrase. Finally, Mr President, I also support you in your intention to have the strategic lines that were laid down in the Tampere Council conclusions approved, specifically in the fight against drug trafficking, and I hope that the Portuguese Presidency will be willing to adopt its own action plan in the next six-monthly term.

Political group: PSE
Many of the achievements of Barcelona are, of course, welcome, and I join with those who have been recognising the enormous efforts of the Spanish presidency and the European Commission in pushing forward those achievements. We should be no under illusions, however: the method by which these summits are organised is now in crisis. We are all suffering from 'summititis', a condition in which wildly inflated expectations puff up before each summit. It must be said that this situation is not helped by some rather hyperbolic rhetoric from certain European Union capitals, for example describing the summit as a 'make-or-break event'. These expectations are then inevitably dashed when set against the realities of grubby deal-making in the European Council. This harms the credibility of all of us. It really is time to stop the illusion that suggests that European Union competitiveness can somehow be invented at annual spring European Union summits. That is not how to create competitiveness. Creating competitiveness requires a much more prosaic approach. The Lisbon 2002 objective requires constant hard slog and a consistently-applied approach across many policy fields, not an endless diet of symbolic and tokenistic rhetoric. My final point: competitiveness is not just about how you launch initiatives and how many targets you set. It is also about how legislation and regulation is designed and crafted to ensure that it has the impact for which it is intended. Too often, European Union legislation and regulation have effects which run directly counter to the wider aspiration of competitiveness. I was glad to hear this view echoed by Mr Barón Crespo earlier. I welcome Paragraph 19 of the Barcelona summit conclusions and look forward to the new interinstitutional approach, which we hope will install regulatory impact assessments applicable to the work of all European Union institutions. We look forward to that initiative appearing at the Seville summit.

Political group: ELDR
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, what Mrs Doyle said gives great cause for concern in terms of both procedure and the subject matter, and it is this latter aspect which I would like to consider for a moment. We are in a situation where agreements on the environment are never observed: the most striking example is the Kyoto Agreement. I hope that the Commission will reflect on its future approach to cooperation with Members of Parliament – including outside the European Union – but above all, with regard to the subject matter, I hope that it will work much harder to preserve the conditions necessary for the survival not just of the European Union and its almost 400 million inhabitants – which soon will exceed 400 million – but of the whole planet. While I am anything but anti-American, I nevertheless feel that great pressure needs to be exerted on President Bush’s administration so that issues such as the climate, climate change and the environment are given more attention and not just addressed from a financial perspective and with a narrow rather than a far-sighted monetary approach. We should work much harder in this respect, and I trust the Commission will do so.

Political group: PPE-DE
My interest is to assess the efficacy of the EU in giving development aid to any of the third world countries. So will the Commission answer my questions if I take one of the third world countries as a model and try to assess how effectual our aid is and what the delegation does?

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, this own-initiative report on agriculture and agricultural research has my full support. I too take the view that the right approach has been adopted by addressing future-oriented issues on the basis of an analysis which preceded this own-initiative report. I hope, of course, as previous speakers have already said, that the Commission will draw the right conclusions, for the CAP reform in particular has brought about a paradigm shift in European agriculture and I hope that scientific monitoring will be effective here in future too. I think it is right, and would like to reiterate here, that the budget for the next framework programme has been set on the basis of proposed projects. I am unsure how the 2% is arrived at, but I think it probably conceals projects as well. In the settlement of the current programme, it will be very interesting to see exactly what has happened. Agricultural research is generally multiannual, and I have been told about projects undertaken within this multiannual research framework that have never entered their final phase due to budget cutbacks. The Member States are also very keen on cutting research funding. Yet any research that does not produce results is a waste of resources. In the previous debate, complex issues relating to more intensive research into income and income generation options were discussed in more detail. It will be very interesting to see how this will look in future, who will be dealing with it, and in which areas, under which conditions and with which assumptions. I too agree that the complex research areas of food and food safety must be addressed in particular. Everything else, however, has been set out so comprehensively in the report that it requires no further comment from me.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, Madam President-in-Office of the Council, Commissioner, we seem to have reached a turning point in transatlantic relations. First there is the legacy of the Clinton era. Even if we leave aside the serious trade differences, the emblematic banana dispute, the beef hormone dispute, the GMO dispute and a dozen others that are being or have already been examined by the WTO, we can see that in recent years, Washington had already shown growing signs of unilateralism, one of the stigmata of the superpower complex. Opposition to the Treaty banning anti-personnel mines, opposition to the Charter on the Rights of the Child, opposition to the establishment of an International Criminal Court that might, one day, have to judge an American citizen, a casual approach to politics and financial blackmail of the United Nations, an economic blockade, in fact a military operation that violates international law, the Echelon affair, the Colombia plan – the list is endless. Moreover, we have hardly had a chance to hold a dialogue with our transatlantic interlocutors about certain decisions that Europeans regard as shocking in a civilised society, such as the death penalty and the refusal to grant universal access to medicines to combat AIDS. Yet we have to admit that the Bush Administration’s first decisions have a more serious impact than anything we have ever seen so far. We were concerned enough when we heard the new President’s advisor on security, Mrs Condoleezza Rice, describe her vision of the new distribution of labour between Americans and Europeans for the maintenance of peace in the Balkans, when she pointed out with as much perspicacity as elegance that it was not the GIs’ job to take children to nursery school. Frankly, we can only describe the refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol and the promotion of the missile defence shield as irresponsible, not only towards Europe but towards mankind as a whole. In view of this escalation, are we condemned to pro forma protests before settling for realism? I think not. A Europe that is open to dialogue but adheres firmly to the principles of a civilised and responsible international community will find allies among the public opinion of the five continents and even in the US Congress and among a number of states. Commissioner, of course we are not trying to promote a sense of anti-Americanism or indulge in aggressive rhetoric towards a partner who is indispensable in today's world. We simply want to set out the clear political resolve of the Fifteen and their united front towards objectives that could meet the expectations not only of Europeans but of all those, in whatever part of the world, who wish to free themselves from the unipolar system in which they are increasingly being confined.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, I hope you and all the interpreters and officials who have had the patience to stay in the Chamber with me have a very good lunch. I have voted for this report and it was my sister who suggested this explanation of vote to me. She said: ‘Listen, when will we finally see the Mona Lisa in Italy? When will we see Michelangelo’s Moses in Strasbourg? And when will we see Van Gogh and Renoir in Spain? They have never been shown in our museums.’ ‘Very soon,’ I replied, ‘because, as well as legislating on the theft of works of art, the European Union will surely also ensure that these works can circulate freely and easily throughout Europe.’ And that is the end of my explanations of vote for today.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, the European Council at Göteborg took two conflicting decisions. On the one hand, it confirmed the timetable for enlargement, as the European Parliament hoped it would, by moving the goal to complete negotiations forward to the end of 2002. This is wonderful news! On the other hand, at the same time, the Heads of State and Government decided to disregard the implications of the Irish ‘no’ vote at the latest referendum. Yet, this ‘no’ vote casts major doubts over the timetable for ratification, and perhaps even as to whether ratification will be achieved. In order for the Treaty of Nice to be ratified, we must now wait for the national elections in Ireland and for these elections to produce a victory in Dublin of a more united majority than the current majority on this issue, and for this majority to be willing to gamble its credibility on this now highly sensitive area. We also need the new leaders to find persuasive arguments to convince the Irish people to change their minds. Those telling us today that this will be a mere formality are the same people who were burying their heads in the sand before the recent referendum. This means that, for the candidate countries, the Treaty of Nice is no longer the key to the door of the European Union it has now become the lock, a stiff lock, firmly bolted into place by the Irish people and there are no guarantees that it will be reopened. That is why opening accession negotiations on the basis of the current treaties, in other words, the Treaty of Amsterdam, is the only thing that can guarantee that the timetable promised at Göteborg will be respected. That is what Mr Prodi attempted to say and he was made to keep quiet. The policy of burying one’s head in the sand is not the right strategy to follow. Institutional reform still has to be carried out, whether or not we have the Treaty of Nice. The European Parliament believes that the reform can only form part of a constitutional approach. In the meantime, however, it is our duty to tell the candidate countries that the only way for them to ensure that the proposed timetable will be respected is by negotiating on the basis of the Treaty of Amsterdam. If the Treaty of Nice is finally ratified by the autumn of 2002, there will still be time to support it. If it is not ratified, enlargement can still go ahead.

Political group: PPE-DE
I should like to begin by stressing that access to a good level of education and training is the right of every individual in order to develop his potential and ability to fit into the economic, social and cultural environment. This fundamental fact has fuelled debates at the European Council meetings in Lisbon and Feira. We further acknowledged that this right must be adapted to cater for the advent of the information society. New information and communications technology do indeed have serious repercussions on teaching methodology. It is now acknowledged that education and training should be a lifelong process and so, throughout these summit meetings, the Commission and the Member States have been encouraged to define coherent strategies and practical measures in order to make lifelong education and training accessible to all. Some parties had, however, begun to consider this subject well before that, since, even in 1996, the Commission proposed to the Council and to Parliament that the year 1996 be declared the ‘European Year of Lifelong Learning’. The purpose of this year was to make European citizens aware of new concepts in academic and vocational education and to conduct joint discussions with all the operators involved in the role and the stakes of education and training at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Given the high stakes involved, I can only, like our rapporteur, deplore the fact that the budget for the European Year of Lifelong Learning was limited to EUR 8.4 million for the fifteen Member States and their three partners in the EEA. By the same token, we must deplore the flagrant lack of qualitative data in the Commission report. The Commission should therefore improve the quality of its reports in future. In future programmes, their work should concentrate on defining with greater precision the various concepts and aspects of vocational and lifelong training. They should also speedily implement action programmes and specific measures in the context of a lifelong education and training strategy. The implementation of such measures must be coordinated with the Socrates II and Leonardo programmes. It is up to us to ensure that all citizens can benefit from this training in new technologies, as there is a great danger of seeing a ‘digital divide’ being established between the men and women who have the means to access this technology and those who do not. The entire debate on the place of universal public service in new telecommunications networks is also involved.

Political group: PSE
Commissioner, you have failed to answer my question. I want to know what assessments you are making on financial aid. This relates to the previous question by Mr Turmes as well and the answer you gave to that in respect of competition policy on electricity production in the EU. I conclude from your answers both to my question and the previous one that here we have not just a white elephant in the nuclear industry in Europe but a holy cow. You can provide state aids that are untouchable, even by a Commissioner as powerful as yourself! But let me ask you what exactly is the situation? You said that under the Treaties there are derogations – and you quoted the Euratom Treaty. There is clearly a distortion between Member States because of the state aids. Where exactly in the Treaty are the written permissions for these state aids? Could you elaborate on that please?

Political group: Verts-ALE
Mr President, the illegal trafficking in human beings has become one of the most horrendous crimes that we see and it must be tracked down and eradicated through the law and through international cooperation. The European Union governments committed themselves to this in the Tampere conclusions and it also requires the necessary cooperation of the countries of origin and especially operators involved in the transport of passengers. The problem is how to harmonise the various legislation of the Member States and to seek formulas for approximation. There is no doubt that transporters have to take on the obligation to verify whether foreign nationals meet entrance requirements. The formula proposed by the present initiative to establish a minimum fine of no less than EUR 5 000 per person transported does not seem unreasonable. We should also, however, impose the confiscation of vehicles used by transporters, not merely as a possibility but as a mandatory penalty. It also seems necessary to ensure that the transportation of people who may be eligible, under the Geneva Convention, to apply for asylum, should not be punishable. Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, in summary, the Union’s governments should make the greatest possible efforts so that transporters, border police and customs police fulfil their obligations in a duly coordinated fashion, and prevent mafia networks from trafficking in human beings. This is not the only way to combat illegal human trafficking. We must share responsibility for this serious problem which the whole of European society is obliged to confront. It is therefore urgent, ladies and gentlemen, that this initiative, which we have been discussing for several months, should become reality as soon as possible.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, both rapporteurs speak from experience, as is evident from their first-rate reports. As far as Mr Mennea’s report is concerned, I have attempted to highlight three points in the amendments which I tabled, and which have fortunately been adopted in the final motion for a resolution. One is the importance of sport as a mental activity in order to learn a number of social skills. Secondly, sport helps us appreciate activities in forma pauperis which involve minority groups that deserve more support, also at European level. My third point serves as a warning against the yawning gap which can arise between top sport and smaller sports associations on the one hand and professional and amateur sport on the other. In both cases, one very much relies on the other. As to the question of whether sport should be dealt with at European level, I certainly believe it should. Therefore, this report does not mark the end of the game, quite the reverse. The role and impact sport has in society have become so enormous, and the entire sports scene is undergoing such change, that as far as the social debate is concerned, we are only just in the first heats, if at all. The European Parliament needs to ensure that it is not left on the sidelines in this debate, but plays an active part so that we can help decide the shape of the game.

Political group: ELDR
Mr President, I am delighted that the House has agreed to debate this important topic. I also hope that this is an issue on which the whole House can unite on a cross-party basis. The subject is not just about demographic trends in general. My oral question specifically asks for more attention to be given to issues associated with ageing. Too often, ageing is just seen as a problem; it should also be seen as an opportunity. Too often, the elderly are seen as people with disabilities and with needs; they should also be seen as people with abilities and with rights. There are many aspects to be reviewed, but in the time available I will just focus on one: the opportunity for the elderly to continue in work if that is their wish. I therefore welcome the approach taken by the Employment Task Force chaired by Wim Kok. This report refers to one of the Lisbon Council conclusions that is often overlooked, that by 2010 the target is for 50% of 55-64 year-olds to be in employment. Currently, only Sweden, Denmark, Portugal and the United Kingdom have reached this target. Belgium, Italy, France, Luxembourg and Austria have employment rates for older workers of less than 33%. Delaying the average age at which people leave the labour force is crucial. Luxembourg, Belgium and France among the current Member States, plus Poland, Lithuania, Hungary and Slovakia among the incoming Member States all have average work exit ages well below the EU average. They will be particularly stretched to meet the agreed target and their policies will have to change radically in order to achieve it. Will they grasp the challenge? But even the EU as it exists today will miss the 50% target unless it can increase the number of older workers in work by seven million over the next seven years. This means that two-thirds of the current 46-55 age group must still be active in the labour market in 2010. This means in turn a significant change, because only half of those in this group and in employment in 1991 were still working ten years later. This is the reason I tabled this question. It is a matter for Member States, but the issue is: will Member States act on these employment task force conclusions within a defined and early timetable? Will the Commission put together an early progress report to present to Parliament, ideally by the end of this year? Finally, will Member States implement all the provisions on age discrimination in the employment directive without further delay? I hope the answer to all of these can be 'yes'.

Political group: PPE-DE
Commissioner, in view of the enormous wine harvest, which yielded 140 million hectolitres, and in view of the wine market regulations that are to enter into force this year, has the Commission had any more thoughts – this being the last year when we will have this option – about using obligatory distillation as a means of relieving pressure on the market, or does the Commission not take the view that this would be the subject of a further instrument?

Political group: PPE-DE