Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-11-17-Speech-5-026"
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"en.20001117.3.5-026"2
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"Mr President, if there is one thing I have learnt about constituency problems since I was elected to the House, it is how very variable throughout Europe is the interpretation of Articles 5 and 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights – the right to brief detention before trial and the right to a speedy trial, the right to be released pending trial if the trial cannot proceed speedily.
These rights are very differently interpreted in different parts of the Union. I come from a country in which the maximum period of detention allowed by law is 110 days. After 110 days of detention a person, if not tried, must be released and never tried for that offence again.
From what I see, conditions in French and Portuguese jails are very different. People can be kept for enormously long periods of time awaiting trial. We do not really have a common culture in Europe on these important points.
This connects exactly to our culture of policing. Do we have a culture of policing in which the idea is to detain people as briefly as necessary, find the evidence as quickly and expeditiously as possible and get trials moving forward, or do we have a system where people do it as it suits them best? If we could develop a common culture of policing in Europe, and if it were based on best practice, then that would be a fine thing. But, as I have said in another debate this week, the danger is that we develop a kind of general casualness, we have moved to the lowest common denominator, not the highest common factor. Let us make sure that if we have a police college it is, as Mr Posselt's report stresses, grounded in the need to develop and enhance respect for human and civil rights in our police culture. Police efficiency is not just to do with grabbing guys and putting them inside. It is to do with finding the people who actually commit crimes and proving the case against them in a civilised way, with a proper connection between prosecution services and police services. If we can get a police college for the whole of Europe to do that or begin to develop this kind of common culture that would be a very good thing.
The majority of those who have spoken so far seem to think that it is vital to have a single permanent seat for the college. I see the need for a permanent seat for its administration but I want Members of the House to think seriously about whether, in the interest of a common police culture in Europe, it would be better to take everybody to one place or to have courses which move year-by-year or subject-by-subject to different police colleges and academies in different parts of the Union. That way, people begin to appreciate differences of local assumption, differences of local approach. We hope that over time our police forces will genuinely learn from each other and learn best practice from each other, not worst practice. If that could be done we would have a police academy of which we, as Europeans, might be proud. I hope that will be the result of this excellent proposal and this excellent report."@en1
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