Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-04-05-Speech-4-244"
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"en.20010405.14.4-244"2
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"Mr President, having heard Commissioner Fischler’s answer it gives me the impression that at the moment on this matter the Commission is completely unprepared. I think that it is only starting to see the outer layer of the problems.
Because I was thinking a moment ago that in the last part-session, Commissioner Reding, sitting where Commissioner Fischler is sitting now, gave us a detailed explanation of the agreement that had been reached between the Commission, FIFA and UEFA. That is a business worth many billions of euros and in that case it seems that competition gives way to quality. At times it seems that quality is very important, and I agree with this interpretation.
We are talking about a profession, that of a lawyer, which is said to be one of the oldest professions in the world – they say that there is another profession that is older, but I am not going to mention it to avoid being accused of sexism. The law profession is very old and the danger of that is that lawyers deal with quantities. Using the words of Karl Marx, here quality becomes quantity, or the reverse, if you like, because lawyers are defending interests that can be quantified.
In the different countries of the Community, or at least in some of them, there is a system of protection through professional organisations, which is not perfect and could be improved but which at least establishes some guarantees, as there are too many unscrupulous lawyers who, left to the free interaction of supply and demand, could be tempted to act and abuse their position.
I have the impression that the Commission is currently at a very immature time and therefore that we should look at this subject with a degree of calm. I think that we need to start seeing what is happening – I think that Mr Tannock was referring to this – in the different Member States, what makes it difficult for someone to go to a lawyer and, above all, why people are afraid of going to a lawyer.
That is to say, I think that there are real problems, but that those real problems cannot be solved by mathematically applying the rules of Community competition and much less by focusing solely on the criterion of prices. I think that the ideal would be for us to have a professional lawyers’ organisation covering the whole Community, not so much in order to protect lawyers but to protect consumers. We have to think about moving towards an area in which there is protection for people who go to lawyers, protection for consumers, protection for clients, and I think that the conclusion that we could therefore draw here is to invite the Commission to continue to look at the issue and, perhaps with the cooperation of Parliament, to see what the sectors involved say, including, of course, the clients, the people who would like to go to a lawyer, but who normally do not go out of fear."@en1
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