ddrg/super_eurlex huggingface dataset:
6.

Draws attention to the JPA’s concern at the repercussions of the current financial crisis, the adoption in Luanda of a resolution on the impact of the financial crisis on the ACP States and the resolutions on its impact and on addressing the crisis in the ACP States; encourages the JPA to continue to work on this area and to explore additional and innovative sources of financing for development, such as an international financial transaction tax; further calls on the JPA to address the question of the eradication of tax havens;
9.

Draws attention to the role of the Commission's Monitoring and Information Centre (MIC) in facilitating disaster relief coordination under the Civil Protection Mechanism and highlights the need for close cooperation between the centre and the EEAS to be ensured by the Vice-President/High Representative in her capacity as Vice-President of the Commission; calls for improved coordination and faster deployment of military assets in the context of disaster relief, in particular air transport capabilities, based on the lessons learned in Haiti and while respecting the primarily civilian nature of disaster relief operations; reiterates its call for further improvement of the Civil Protection Mechanism to establish a voluntary pool of Member States’ assets on stand-by for immediate deployment in disaster response operations; suggests that these assets be coordinated and deployed under the designation of an EU Civil Protection Force to increase the visibility of EU action; recalls at the same time the individual responsibility of the Member States for civil protection and disaster control measures;
7.

Welcomes the establishment of three committees, each chaired by an independent, respected eminent person, on reform of the institutions and of institutional laws, the fight against corruption and events since 17 December 2010; underlines the fact that they must be able to act with complete independence and have genuine powers of inquiry; considers that, insofar as they so wish, these commissions must be able to benefit from the expertise and support of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and from pertinent mechanisms at the United Nations;
9.

Calls on the EU and Member States to ensure that their foreign policy, including their cooperation and development policy, vis-à-vis third countries, in relation to both authorities and NGOs, takes into proper consideration the human rights situation of all minority groups including LGBT persons, and to ensure that tangible progress is made in this field; calls on the Commission, the Council and the European External Action Service to make full use of the Toolkit to Promote and Protect the Enjoyment of all Human Rights by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) People in their dealings with Uganda, provide full protection for LGBT activists in Uganda, and support their activities; calls on the Commission to include these issues in the Roadmap against homophobia which the European Parliament has requested it to draft (3);
10.

Is concerned at the complexity of EU financial regulations and guidelines for European financial instruments, in particular when European funds and programmes are used to support individual enterprises through the provision of relatively small amounts of funding; considers that the expense in terms of time and money involved in complying with these regulations is out of all proportion to the benefits for the final recipient of the funding; calls for streamlined management, administrative and reporting efficiency and cost-effectiveness in connection with innovative financial instruments; insists that banks, intermediaries and beneficiaries must not be discouraged or deterred from using programmes and funds by the administrative burdens involved; asks the Commission to propose simplified and less costly regulations and guidelines, especially for programmes intended to support low-volume SME finance in the form of guarantees and mezzanine or equity instruments;
19.

Urges the EU to pro-actively contribute and support, at the upcoming UNHRC session, a resolution relating to the report on follow-up of the committee of independent experts to the international fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict, in order to ensure accountability for the violations of international law and support a referral to the GA and to International Justice mechanisms in the event of Israel and Palestinian parties failing to comply with their obligation to carry out investigations according to international standards; further calls on the High Representative to actively monitor compliance with the findings of the ‘Follow-up to the report of the international fact-finding mission on the incident of the humanitarian flotilla’, ensuring principles of accountability and liability are upheld; underlines in this respect that human rights aspects have to be first discussed within the EU-Israel Association Council and the EU-PA Joint Committee; is particularly concerned by the fact that the conclusions of the EU-Israel Association Council of 21 February 2011 do not reflect the EU position on this matter;
4.

Urges the Council, Commission and Member States to actively engage with the AU and the SADC, in particular South Africa, so as to ensure that intimidation and violence do not take place in connection with future elections in Zimbabwe; is of the view, however, that an early election would not resolve outstanding political and economic reform issues; considers that any elections must be based on international norms, including respect for human rights, freedom of expression and movement, with an immediate end to harassment and detention of individuals based on their political views;
23.

Notes that the ECA audit is still ongoing; suggests that this should help to reveal the objectives of the use of the funds and their effectiveness, as well as viable proposals for the future, and assess the additional funding required in order to perform the decommissioning; suggests that, being a full performance audit, it should clarify the following: — whether the funds were used for the purposes for which they were intended, — whether procurement procedures were properly drawn up and respected, — whether the money allocated contributed to increasing safety in the decommissioning activity; — whether the procurement procedures ensured that the companies involved will provide safety to EU standards, — whether there are activities where OLAF is involved, — whether proper coordination among the three existing programmes occurred, in order to make efficient use of experience gained and of previously prepared and financed projects, and in what regards the decommissioning programmes overlapped (given, for example, that there are several similar projects related to storage, personnel qualification, etc which could have been adapted from one NPP to another, leading to savings);
39.

Draws attention to the energy-saving potential of SMEs, as only up to 24 % of SMEs are actively engaged in actions reducing their environmental impact today; highlights that applying cost-effective energy efficiency measures would help SMEs to reduce their energy bills and increase their capacity for reinvestment; believes that there is a strong need to promote the improvement of ‘low-carbon literacy’ on the part of small and medium entrepreneurs; stresses that while there is at least one financial consultant available for each SME, there are very few experts providing advice to SMEs on energy savings and efficiency;
50.

Condemns the severe repression carried out by the regime of Belarusian President Lukashenko against members of the opposition, journalists and representatives of civil society following the presidential elections of 19 December 2010 and calls for the immediate release of all those who have been detained and for them to be cleared of all charges; welcomes the decision of the Council of 31 January 2011 to impose a visa ban and to freeze financial assets of 157 selected Belarusian officials; takes the position that sanctions against the Belarusian government officials should remain in force until all political prisoners are released from Belarusian prisons; welcomes the outcome of the International Conference of Donors on ‧Solidarity with Belarus‧ of 2 February 2011, as part of which the EU has pledged EUR 17.3 million for actions to support civil society, in particular students and the independent media; takes the view that the Commission should enhance people-to-people contacts between the EU and Belarus; encourages those Member States which have not yet done so to take unilateral steps to facilitate the issuance and to reduce the price of short-term visas, in particular Schengen visas, since they are most relevant to the wider society, students and other young people; stresses the importance of ensuring that Belarus does not become isolated, in particular from the existing regional frameworks;
21.

Calls on the Commission and the Member States to make the elimination of child labour and respect for children’s rights a priority in trade agreements, dialogues with other countries and in development cooperation and notes that the private sector has a key role to play in respecting children’s rights; takes the view that measures to combat child labour should include the creation of decent jobs for adults while enabling children to receive a suitable education; asks furthermore for an EU child labour hotline to be set up where citizens can report all companies that make use of child labour anywhere in the world; considers that this hotline should have a small but sufficient capacity enabling it to publish an annual report on its findings;
117.

Supports the objective of increasing the number of researchers in the EU by one million by 2020, and observes that such an enormous investment would have significant multiplier effects on employment, but at the same time maintains that this is a very ambitious goal which would require objectives to be set for each individual country and purposeful efforts to be made; notes that the public sector does not necessarily have sufficient funds to do this, so that although there is a strong need to increase the number of posts for researchers at higher education establishments and public research institutes, most of the new researchers will be employed in the private sector; points out that attention should be focused less on the number of researchers than their innovativeness, the quality of their education, the European division of labour in the field of research, resources for research and the quality of research;
110.

Underlines the importance of closer and more effective collaboration with the private sector and financial institutions, especially the European Investment Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to promote the necessary financing, in particular for priority cross-border projects; calls on the Commission to explore other innovative financial instruments and help to promote the establishment of public-private partnerships, for which local, regional and national authorities provide incentives and the necessary legislative framework and policy support; stresses in this context the need to develop technical assistance and financial engineering at local and regional authority level in order to support local players in setting up projects of energy efficiency – e.g. by harnessing the EIB’s ELENA technical assistance facility and the experience of ESCO where energy efficiency infrastructure is concerned;
6.

Views with regret the US President’s decision of 7 March 2011 to sign the executive order on detention and the revocation of the ban on military tribunals; is convinced that normal criminal trials under civilian jurisdiction are the best way to resolve the status of Guantánamo detainees; insists that Mr al-Nashiri, and all other detainees in US custody, should be charged promptly and tried in accordance with international standards of the rule of law or else released; emphasises, in this context, that the same standards concerning fair trials should apply to all, without discrimination;
H.

whereas the abolition of internal border controls requires the Member States to have complete trust in one another’s capacity to implement fully the accompanying measures allowing such controls to be lifted; whereas the security of the Schengen area depends on the rigour and effectiveness with which each Member State carries out controls at its external borders, as well as on the quality and speed of exchanges of information via the SIS; whereas the inadequate functioning of any of these elements presents a risk to the security of the EU as a whole,
11.

Welcomes the Commission’s decision to declare 2013 the ‘European Year of Citizenship’ in order to give momentum to the debate on European citizenship and inform EU citizens of their rights and of the democratic instruments available to them to assert those rights; takes the view that the ‘European Year of Citizenship’ should be used for the broad dissemination of information on the new ‘European citizens’ initiative’, in order to forestall a high rate of inadmissibility comparable to the rate that is still to be found in the ‘petitions’ field; considers that at the same time a debate should be opened on the limited scope of the ‘Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union’;
41.

Calls on the European institutions to send out a clear message at EU and international level with a view to curbing all forms of money laundering through the use of the financial markets, in particular by:envisaging possible capital control measures, as recently suggested by the International Monetary Fund itself; encouraging a reduction of the pervasiveness of the financial markets in the context of short-term operations; imposing increased transparency on the use of public funds, first and foremost on those to support private-sector development, and carrying out an effective offensive against tax havens by imposing country-by-country financial reporting on all multinational economic operators; promoting a multilateral agreement on the exchange of tax-related information whilst revising the definition of ‘tax haven’ and the list of these secret jurisdictions; calls on the Commission to draw up clear guidelines on the traceability of money so as to make it easier to identify cases involving the laundering of money deriving from illegal activities; calls on the Commission, with a view to its legislative proposal to update the Money Laundering Directive, to generalise as far as possible the criminalisation of laundering of the proceeds of crime and to establish a legal basis for the widest possible range of investigative powers in this area; calls, in this connection, for all the Member States to be required to criminalise ‘self-laundering’, or the laundering of illicit funds by the very person or entity having obtained those funds by unlawful means; also calls on the Commission, in its proposal, to consider the possibility of extending the criminalisation of laundering to cases where the perpetrator should have known that the assets in question were the proceeds of crime;
22.

Notes that most dams are designed on the basis of historical data of river flows, with the assumption that the pattern of flows will remain the same as in the past; points out that climate change has introduced huge uncertainties in the basic parameters affecting dam projects (as climate change is not just about averages, but also about extremes); points out also that climate change is likely to exacerbate further the problems connected with sedimentation, whose accumulation behind these dams also deprives downstream plains of nutrients that are essential to soil fertility;
42.

Stresses the need for consultation with beekeepers by European and national authorities during the drawing up of apiculture programmes and of related legislation, in order to ensure the effectiveness of these programmes and their timely implementation; calls on the Commission to provide significantly more financial resources, by stepping up the current support for apiculture in the CAP after 2013 and guaranteeing the continued existence and improvement of the existing support programmes(Regulation (EC) No 1221/97) for the beekeeping sector, and to encourage the development of joint projects, and on the Member States to provide technical assistance for the beekeeping sector; calls on the Commission to ensure that the system of co-financing is compatible with the establishment of direct aid under the first pillar of the CAP (optional implementation of the current Article 68 of the CAP) by those states that consider it necessary; stresses also the need to encourage young beekeepers to enter the sector; calls on the Commission to provide a safety net or a common insurance system for apiculture in order to mitigate the impact of crisis situations on beekeepers;
3.

Welcomes the efforts made by the Egyptian authorities to identify the authors and perpetrators of the attacks on Christian communities; stresses that it is important that an independent, thorough and transparent investigation into the events in Maspero should be conducted by an independent civil judiciary, in order to hold all those responsible to account; stresses that the role of the media has to be fully addressed; notes the government’s announcements about the immediate consideration of a draft decree aiming to legalise the status of places of worship built without proper authorisation as well as about strengthening legal instruments aimed at fighting discrimination both in the public and private domains; stresses, however, the responsibility of the Egyptian Government and authorities to ensure the safety of all citizens in the country and that those responsible for the violence be brought to justice;
14.

Recalls that the efforts to uphold the rule of law should constitute the utmost priority of the authorities; welcomes the progress in the fight against corruption, manifested inter alia by the recent high-profile prosecutions and by the establishment of the appropriate legal framework, as well as by the launching of the activities of the Anti-Corruption Agency in January 2010, but underlines that corruption is still prevalent in the country and calls for more efforts to eradicate it; notes in particular the role played by trafficking and the negative consequences of this and other forms of illicit activities in sustaining criminal networks; draws attention to the practice of holding double offices, which presents a serious risk of conflicts of interests and which should be addressed as a matter of priority; in this connection, is concerned about the recent changes to the Law on the Anti-Corruption Agency, which tend in the opposite direction, and notes the Agency’s referral to the Constitutional Court of the constitutionality of this provision; calls on the authorities to give all necessary political and administrative support to the activities of the Anti-Corruption Agency and underlines the need to swiftly investigate the cases of corruption reported by the Agency; calls for the adoption of the amendments to the Law on the Financing of Political Parties in order to ensure full transparency and an efficient system for monitoring party financing; encourages the authorities to adopt legislation providing effective protection of whistleblowers; stresses the importance of the restitution of property as an important step in administering justice; stresses the importance of following established procedures rigorously in order to strengthen society’s trust in the impartiality of the administration of justice;
E.

whereas the draft text of Protocol VI to the CCW to be discussed at the Fourth CCW Review Conference is neither legally compatible with nor complementary to the CCM; whereas, while States Parties to the CCM are legally bound to destroy all munitions, this draft protocol would only ban pre-1980 cluster munitions, provides for a lengthy transitional period that would enable compliance to be deferred for at least 12 years, would allow the use of cluster munitions with only one self-destruction mechanism, and would permit states to use cluster munitions with a so-called failure rate of 1 % or less;
9.

Recalls that one of the key features of VAT is the principle of neutrality and therefore that businesses should, as far as is possible, not be made to bear the burden of VAT collection; points out that Member States should ensure that in principle all commercial transactions are taxed as far as possible and that any exemptions are construed narrowly, whilst also ensuring that similar goods and services are subject to the same VAT treatments; underlines, for example, that all books, newspapers and magazines regardless of format should be treated in exactly the same way, which means that downloadable and streamed books, newspapers and magazines should be subject to the same VAT treatment as books, newspapers and magazines on physical means of support and that different cross-border transport services should be given identical VAT treatments irrespective of the mode of transport used; notes that when exemptions present no obstacle to the proper functioning of the internal market Member States should retain the right to grant exemptions based on narrowly construed social and cultural criteria;
10.

Recognises that procedural safeguards and proper scrutiny of all the adoption documents, including birth certificates, help to protect a child against violations of hi or her rights stemming from doubts over age or identity; believes that a reliable system of birth registration can prevent child trafficking for adoption, and calls for consideration to be given to legal solutions to facilitate the mutual recognition of the documents necessary for adoption;
85.

Recalls the need to ensure that the financing of the Europe 2020 objectives is duly taken into account in the annual budgets of the EU and of the Member States; stresses that the most simple, democratic, European and efficient way of achieving this objective is to organise at the beginning of every European Semester an interparliamentary debate on the common budgetary orientations of the Member States and the Union; believes that such a debate, while helping to reduce duplicated structures significantly, would at the same time allow the Member States to take more account of the European dimension in their draft budgets and enable the European Parliament to take better account of national concerns;
30.

Urges the Commission to complete the legislative framework and put forward a proposal for effective governance of the different levels of development and management of the programme by drawing on the expert knowledge held by public bodies in the EU, including EU agencies, and by the private sector, for the development and coordination of user-driven services; urges the Commission and the other institutions to include financing for GMES in the multiannual financial framework for 2014-2020; reiterates that inclusion of GMES funding in the multiannual financial framework would avoid wasting investment to date in the Seventh Framework Programme of Research in the field of services and information; points out that the lack of a financing plan providing long-term economic support will mean that investment made to date has been fruitless; believes that asking the Member States to continue to cover the costs of the launch and annual maintenance of the programme would lead in the long term to greater costs, disparity of access to resulting information and benefits for European citizens, a likely temporary suspension of the programme itself, subsequent interruption in data provision, and ultimately a dependence on non-European space infrastructure, placing the sector-related industries in a precarious economic situation;