GwendalTsang/DEFT09-parquet huggingface dataset:
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, Mrs Flemming's remarks oblige me to say that we should not view this report in isolation from other reports and initiatives, for example, the Lisbon strategy, which also aims towards social cohesion and sustainability, the Commission report on the evaluation of national strategies for adequate and sustainable pensions, or the Streamlining Report on the coordination of employment policy with economic policy. All these serve the purpose of ensuring that our social security system continues to be financially viable, because that is what is needed. Demographic changes are relevant to every area of policy and have effects on the social fabric and on the socio-political framework, and so I welcome this report and this debate as helping to increase our awareness of these things. Action is needed, on the part of all of and us at every political level. A survey by Eurostat, a few days ago, showed that in 2002 there were fewer births, but more deaths, recorded in the EU. The number of live births in the EU reached 3.99 million in 2002, which is 0.3% fewer than in 2001. It is estimated that, in 2002, some 3.68 million people died in the EU, which amounts to some 60 000 more than in 2001. These figures alone show that our society faces a change which will affect policy on social security, employment, finance and the economy. There is just one aspect that I would like to pick out – that of care. In my country – Austria – alone, 540 000 people are at present in need of help and care. This figure will increase to just over 800 000 by 2011. At the same time, 84% of all those in need of care – and this is the case in all countries – receive that care from members of their own family. Only 26% require or receive additional help or avail themselves of it. Demographic and economic changes mean, though, that the family members who provide care are becoming fewer in number. The number of people employed in the care field has increased by 5.5%, so the health and welfare sector is creating jobs. Underdevelopment of many areas of the mobile care and support services means that far from all the sufficiently trained staff can be employed. I therefore demand certain things above all in this context. Among other things, we should be attaching greater importance to the mobile services and to the services needed to supplement them – hospices, family support, and day centres – and extending them. There is a need for a build-up of resources in personal environments and for more extensive support both for recipients of care and for their families. In my view, though, we also need uniform standards of training and professional development, as aid is often required across national boundaries. The caring professions need a campaign to enhance their image and we have to explore why they are so unstable and why staff remain in them for so short a time. Care is one of the greatest challenges of our time, and we need European standards for it. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, I would like to start by thanking the two rapporteurs, Mrs Muscardini and Mr Naïr, who have produced sound, high-quality reports on the future of the Mediterranean policy. I feel that a boost needs to be given to the political, cultural and economic aspects of the Mediterranean policy: because we must increasingly consolidate democracy and the parliamentary system, because we must expand the borders of the rule of law, because we need to realise the importance of protecting human rights, because we need cultural exchange promoting mutual awareness of societies, particularly where Islamic communities are concerned, because we need to create multiethnic, multiracial, multireligious and multicultural societies and therefore reassert the principle of respect for minority cultures as part and parcel of democracies and emphasise the importance of peace in the daily lives of the citizens of the southern side of the Mediterranean, thereby excluding from the cultural process all radical or fundamentalist behaviour and all hate, which leads to conflict, massacre and war. Moreover, commercial interexchange is important for Europe, and it is also important to be able to provide and guarantee vocational training and adequate financial instruments, and also support and advice in respect of the currencies of these countries, for, apart from anything else, the free-trade area will then have to become a euro zone. This is what we expect. However, I feel that the European Union needs to do an about-turn for, in my opinion, the current line is to withdraw from the expected prospects and commitments. The cutback in the MEDA programme, for reasons which I see as excuses, and delays in the partnership processes are alarming. Declarations of principles have been followed not by action but by delays in action. We must prove wrong the theory that enlargement means a decline in interest in the Mediterranean. We call for decisive reversal of the trend; we also call for resolute commitment to the Mediterranean peace process between Israelis and Palestinians, and not just between these two peoples but in the entire area, to tackle the problems of the Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran, so that all this can bring peace and tranquillity to that region of the world. Let us therefore make our Mediterranean a sea of peace – for it used to be a sea of culture – where children, women and citizens can trade and move freely throughout the area.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, I would like to say a few words about the Commission’s proposal on sustainable development. It is clear that it could have gone a lot further in many areas, but even so I must say that it was tougher than expected and that it contains several proposals which, if carried out, will really make a difference compared with today’s policy on the environment. Above all, I would like to highlight the requirements to limit road transport, reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, remove harmful subsidies, change procurement regulations in favour of the environment and adapt the common agricultural policy. If this is carried out, it will prove an important step in achieving change. The question now is whether these concrete proposals will survive the European Council in Gothenburg. I hope that they will, and that these proposals are not removed from the final document, but remain. Perhaps the general comments could be shortened instead. I believe it can make a real contribution to changing this policy. I wish the Swedish Presidency luck with this. However, the proposal is inadequate in one area, that of international cooperation and links with the World Trade Organisation and environmental regulations.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I want to support this proposal on principle while asking right at the outset whether the previous speaker’s statement that on the one hand we need an innovative and highly effective and competitive service while on the other hand this service should be a public service, is not a contradiction in terms. I think ours is a different approach! European policy has liberalised monopoly markets – energy, telecommunications and air transport – and the target, the focus, was always the consumer. The aim was simply to offer a better service and also to put the emphasis on the user in liberalising the postal services. I think the consumer can decide for himself and define in advance what he needs. He does not need a government to do so, or a parliament, nor does he need a Commission to do so! The postal market is limping along behind and, sadly, we have wasted valuable time here. I believe we should give the postal service a chance to adapt to new trends. I am thinking here of the very sound words of Mr Rübig, who also talked about e-commerce. That will develop very quickly and present the various undertakings in our society with new challenges; we will have to adapt very flexibly and rapidly to these challenges. I believe a liberalised market will speed up this process more than a less liberalised market. It also offers some prospect of conveying a positive picture of European policy. We should seize that opportunity, for the citizen keeps asking, why do we have Europe? These are areas where the citizen can see and understand the benefit of Europe. I am glad Mr Monti, the Commissioner for competition, is here today in person, for he is pursuing an excellent policy. And here I want to turn to an area where in my view – and this is a point also made in this debate – Parliament and the Commission must consider where to draw limits to competition. We are in favour of competition as a component of the social market economy, and of course we are also in favour of it because we want this economic system to be as successful as possible. Yet I believe that, as this debate has shown, we have to discuss the limits to competition in some areas. So I would ask you to give an impetus in that direction, together with Parliament. I have mentioned the example of social services before: nowadays we can reduce everything to attracting the customer, including the pensioner in an old people’s home, and the question is whether we want to subject all that to competition, whether that is the right course. I believe we should use this legislative term to determine the limits, the positive aspects of competition. For competition is not an end in itself; it is there to serve of the citizen, the consumer, which is why we should consider the areas in which we do not want it.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, having only two minutes available to me, I would like to start by saying that I wholeheartedly endorse the arguments that Mrs Rothe has put forward over the last five minutes. I will, however, make some observations by way of adding nuances. The need to protect the climate and the environment means that renewable energies, which will reduce our dependence on oil and gas, are the form of energy for the twenty-first century; without them, though, even with the development strategy, billions of the world’s people will have no future. It is of course a good thing that they will also enable us to create jobs in Europe. I have heard this week that Mr Kerry, the Democrat candidate for the American presidency, has announced that the USA, too, intends to derive 20% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, and this represents a gigantic boom for European industry, as we are the leaders in renewable energy technology, and this will benefit European industry too. If the EU is to create security for investment in the energy sector and in others, then it needs long-term climate protection goals, with renewable sources producing at least 60% of energy by 2050 and at least 20% by 2020. Today, we have less of a problem with renewable energies themselves – in which we are ahead of the field – than with a strategy for efficiency, in which we lag behind China. Yesterday, in the Council, the possibility of coming to an early agreement on the Eco-Design Directive evaporated, as we are no longer able to make ‘win-win’ directives of that sort palatable to the Council, or perhaps also because there is too much lobbying on the part of industry. The resolution, which is supported by all the political groups, also makes it plain that the European Investment Bank must play a higher-profile role. As things stand today, not even 10% of its loans are made to support renewable energies; as they are the energies of the future, that is another area in which political pressure needs to be exerted.

Political group: Verts-ALE
Mr President, the UMTS licences were auctioned for very large sums. What effect will that have on digital television licences? I believe that new jobs have been created precisely by these initiatives, which also involve very substantial investments. What view do you take of the development of risk capital in this field?

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, by agreement with the proposers I would like to ask that we keep “looks to the Member States” and add “and the Council”.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, among the most important infrastructures in island regions are the ports. If, in addition, these regions are remote, this importance becomes strategic. We are therefore interested to see the Council proposal on the change to this decision, approved in 1996. Since then, common positions have been reached between the initial Council proposal and the European Parliament, with the classification of seaports within the trans-European transport networks according to the criteria of annual freight traffic or passenger numbers transported. Throughout this revision process, consensus solutions have been reached which, in the case of the outermost regions of the European Union, may paradoxically have strange consequences – as Mr Mastorakis has mentioned – because there is a risk that certain seaports situated in island capitals, at least in the case of the Canaries, will be included in a category other than that of tourist port because of the use of out-of-date freight figures or through considering domestic passenger traffic. Therefore, every possible precaution must be taken to prevent dysfunctions in specifying the types of project that the ports can have access to as a result of this classification, which I regard as provisional until up-to-date data are available, not forgetting, of course, other possible requirements such as connection to trans-European network land routes or the installation of a number of facilities. Nevertheless, I believe the most important thing is that these ports are included in the trans-European transport networks, with the positive consequences that will bring. I close by congratulating the rapporteur on his work.

Political group: ELDR
Mr President, Commissioner, this morning on French national radio, I heard that liberalisation of the French postal service was now only a matter of days or hours away and that it was irreparable, like the developments with our neighbours in Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany. This concerns us deeply and that is why we requested this debate today. The Commission is committed to a universal postal service, as the European Parliament has shown on several occasions, the postal service is actually, as some speakers have already mentioned, a key factor in social and territorial cohesion. In this connection I should like to ask one of our Swedish MEPs for an opinion of the study which has been carried out and which shows that in fact in the most remote areas of Sweden the postal service was rather poor in terms of distribution. That is not the sort of postal service that we want. The economic value of the postal service was recognised by the Treaty of Amsterdam and we consider that it goes far beyond the distribution of mail. It is the service which remains closest to the citizens and which we call a ‘public service’, which makes it possible for everyone resident within European territory to receive the service, and this entitlement must remain an acquired right, an acquis communautaire. The matter of the European Union’s recognition of a high-quality postal service, available to all, remains valid today, and we are increasingly concerned. That is why today we are asking not to have any nasty surprises in the Committee on Regional Policy, Transport and Tourism come Monday. Let us point out that Parliament’s positions were clearly defined and that the Group of the supported them. This resolution of 14 January 1999 required that, prior to undertaking any liberalisation of this key sector, involving 1.7 million employees after all, the Commission should provide impact studies for this liberalisation. Well, we are not convinced that the studies currently available make it possible to implement this liberalisation right now and we are concerned because it is well known that liberalisation without impact studies would cause thousands of job losses, something we certainly do not want. We value our public service, our universal postal service, because we know, and here too we are acting as representatives of the citizens, that the citizens value this service and the Commission undertook, during Mr Bolkestein’s hearing, to maintain this universal service throughout the European Union. I shall not repeat all the various statements he made at his hearing, I think we all still remember them. We further maintain that we are waiting for this proper evaluation before any definitive decision, as stipulated in the directive and the revision of the 1997 directive. We shall not accept a date for the liberalisation of all activities in the postal sector until the Commission has offered us a guarantee that the universal service will be integrated into this directive and that the public postal service will be maintained in the States which consider this service essential to the citizen.

Political group: Verts-ALE
Mr President, Commissioner, I am old enough to remember the vigorous debate on irradiated food that raged throughout Europe 15 to 20 years ago. It was very similar to the debate on GM foods we have today. It is a fact that unified scientific opinion, the WHO and the FAO say that irradiation in itself is not at all hazardous. It is therefore safe to say that recitals I and J of this report are quite misleading. The technology is presumably good for those parts of the world in which food safety quite simply means having anything at all to eat. Having said that, I would, however, also insist that there is no reason whatsoever in modern Europe for irradiating anything other than, specifically, spices. That is something there are good reasons for doing, because other methods of sterilising spices are still less appropriate from health and environmental points of view. In other cases, it is unnecessary to use this technology in a part of the world, and in a system, in which we work incredibly hard to create a high level of safety throughout the food chain. If we maintain a sufficiently high level of hygiene, apply good production practice and ensure that the refrigeration and freezing chain remains unbroken, we have no need for a technology that may – and I am not saying that this always happens – be misused to conceal a lack of hygiene or deficiencies in the refrigeration chain etc. It is a touch too difficult to monitor this. Naturally, we can say that this treatment is all right, if it is only apparent from the labelling, but I think that the risks of this technology’s being abused are too great. I do not believe it is dangerous, but I think it is extremely inappropriate for ourselves.

Political group: ELDR
Mr President, everyone in this House agrees that reducing or at least stabilising CO2 emissions is an environmental imperative for our planet. In 1992, at the Rio Convention, and then in 1997 at the Kyoto Conference, the European Union led the way. We must now continue to propose a bold and ambitious policy on this subject, and the EU must also remain capable of convincing its partners, which means convincing its own Member States first. For although Europe is talking about this issue, are the fifteen Member States ready to make the necessary efforts and to respect and implement the numerous directives approved here in this House? We must therefore raise awareness among the Member States and among our partners. It has already been mentioned that the United States of America is still reticent about this kind of policy and ambition. The European Union must therefore be resolute in the face of the US Congress and Japan and it must also be able to convince countries such as Russia. You can appreciate the enormous task facing us in this respect, a task also facing us in our discussions on enlarging the EU and our need to convince the applicant States that our environmental ambitions must be heeded. Finally, the people must be made aware for it is through them that progress will be achieved. I do not really favour energy taxes as I do not believe that environmental problems can be systematically solved with taxation. The EU therefore has a real duty to raise awareness and provide information so that behaviour in the EU can change. This is our ambition for the Europe of tomorrow.

Political group: PPE-DE
I find it regrettable that the majority in the European Parliament has not supported the amendment by the Group of the European People’s Party aimed at incorporating especial reference to our Judaeo-Christian roots in the draft Constitution. Even in its present form, however, the Constitution contains elements that are important in terms of Europe’s Christian heritage, in that the preamble refers to Europe’s religious inheritance, and the Christian conception of mankind becomes one of the Constitution’s important foundations through the incorporation of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Article 51 of the draft Treaty, moreover, gives explicit recognition to the status of the churches and non-confessional organisations. So the Constitution includes important features relating to Europe’s religious heritage. By means of its amendment, the Group of the European People’s Party sought to add another important dimension to these elements. It is now for the Intergovernmental Conference, and hence for the Member States, to take on board this proposal and add it to the draft Constitution.

Political group: PPE-DE
It is crucial that we stop the problem of illegal immigration at source and take effective action against individuals involved in the trafficking of human beings (the third most lucrative activity for organised crime) and the economic exploitation of migrants. There must be a common European Union policy in place, aimed at the prevention, the suppression and the effective and deterrent punishment of these criminals, but it is equally essential to adopt measures to protect the safety and dignity of the victims. Special attention needs to be given to the situation of the most vulnerable people, such as women and children. According to an estimate by the International Organization for Migration, trafficking in human beings affects between 700 000 and two million women and children throughout the world every year. I voted for this report because this proposed directive will, by introducing a short-term residence permit for victims of illegal immigration and the traffic in human beings, enable these victims to cooperate in identifying and prosecuting the perpetrators of these crimes. The victims of these networks, who are often subjected to violence, threats, abuse and exclusion, must be allowed to defend themselves and must be helped to free themselves from the traffickers, who exploit their vulnerable economic and social position. They should be given the opportunity to start a new life, with access to suitable housing, medical and psychological care, and access to the job market, education and training. This is a means of strengthening the instruments for combating illegal immigration and the trafficking in human beings.

Political group: PPE-DE