Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-07-05-Speech-3-206"
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"en.20000705.6.3-206"2
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"As other colleagues have said, this is a thoroughly odd proposal. It is a very bad proposal and I hope that Mr Liikanen when he speaks will agree to suspend it. I do not think it should be withdrawn, I think it should be suspended.
I am concerned about the precedent that this proposal will set. The precautionary principle is very sensibly described in a recent Commission paper. There is an obvious danger of applying it too widely because it brings the European Union approach into disrepute. For example, a thousand people a year – no doubt some of them small children – die in England and Wales while falling downstairs. I do hope that does not mean that we are going to see a European Union regulation restricting us all to living in bungalows.
This proposal suggests that, on emotive subjects, the Commission is prepared to act on the basis of that emotion, without the kind of sensible assessment of risk that we need here, as we do for example on risks in foodstuffs. There has to be, even with the precautionary principle, a substantial link between the assessment of risk and action by the European Union. If not, then surely we do not even need a European Food Agency: we can just legislate on the basis of the precautionary principle.
It is the Commission's task to assess that risk. In this case I am not satisfied, as Mr Bowis has said, that the Commission really heeded the advice of its own advisers. When the chairman of the scientific committee came to us he most certainly did not convey to us any sense of the urgent need for action. The conclusion I draw from this is that in future, to avoid this kind of emotive reaction on an emotive subject, we should have a European Union chemicals agency, which will not be the creature of the Commission, to assess risks.
I am concerned that the science behind this proposal is incomplete. Yes, eight Member States have banned phthalates, but when the Commissioner replies, can he tell us whether those eight Member States have supplied the Commission with the scientific evidence that they based their ban on?
We also lack the evidence on migration limits, and that has been mentioned. That might have enabled the Commission to bring forward a proposal we could all agree with. What we therefore have is a thoroughly unsatisfactory proposal. Six phthalates are identified, and a system of warnings proposed that makes no sense. The Environment Committee has taken the logical step that the Commission avoided. If these are dangerous, then they should all be banned and warnings would then be unnecessary. The only problem with this is that the action is then quite disproportionate to the risk, and sets a thoroughly bad precedent for future European Union action in relation to the chemicals we use."@en1
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