Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-10-27-Speech-3-010"
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"en.19991027.1.3-010"2
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"Madam President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, Commissioner, first of all I would like to congratulate the Finnish Presidency on the success of Tampere with regard to the opening up of a new stage in the development of European citizenship, dealing with the always difficult balance between liberty and security. This demonstrates that we are not only building a Union based on freedom for goods, services and capital, but also one which will respond to the question of the freedom of settlement and movement of European citizens. A step forward has been taken with regard to the fourth liberty of the Treaty of Rome: the access to justice beyond national boundaries, thanks to the mutual recognition of sentences, the possibility of fighting organised crime and money-laundering beyond national boundaries.
Furthermore there is another important dimension, Madam President, and that is that we are now on the eve of a new wave of enlargement, as the President-in-Office of the Council has said, and we are also witnessing a series of election results which are a clear warning for all of us that certain xenophobic and racist attitudes are arising within the populations of some of our countries. Therefore, it is very important, at the moment, that we are capable of sending a message of freedom and progress in the face of this type of defensive reaction which demonstrates that not everything has yet been consolidated.
And this is especially important in relation to two issues. The first is asylum. I believe that this is one of the basic freedoms which we have to defend, and to this end, a single system of asylum is very important, and I say this from the point of view of somebody who comes from a country in which political asylum saved the lives of many of those who fought for freedom and allowed them to continue to live in other European countries. The second is immigration. We have to strive, depending on our own particular situations, for legal immigrants to have the same rights, together with a policy of co-development which will prevent the kind of out-of-hand immigration which we have been witnessing for a long time. And to this end, we believe that this is the way to tackle the issue afresh and we also support – as the Parliament’s initiative demonstrates – the creation of a refugee fund, which we believe may be a key element.
To conclude, Madam President, we understand that the Commission has repeated what it did with regard to the internal market, the scoreboard system and the emulation system. This is positive. We still advocate that there should be a public prosecutor to fight fraud at a Community level. Finally, I am grateful to the President-in-Office of the Council for being here today. I regret that the presence of the Council in the Committees of this Parliament has not been too frequent, because that would have helped us to debate and get to know each other better so that we could have moved forward together."@en1
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