Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-06-11-Speech-1-073"
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"en.20010611.4.1-073"2
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"Mr President, I was in Parliament in the summer of 1995 when the appalling crimes of Mr Dutroux were exposed. It was as a direct result of the horror expressed in this Parliament at those dreadful crimes that we began on the path we are still moving along now towards improving legislation for the protection of children. I should like to congratulate both our colleagues on their excellent reports.
I would also like to express my great regret that six years after those heinous crimes were exposed, this man has still not been brought to justice. That perhaps demonstrates that the extent of the crimes was unbelievable to us at the time and that the law was not adequate to deal with them. Yet it remains an absolute disgrace that this man has not yet been brought to justice.
I should like to make a few technical remarks about the report. The strong transnational dimension of the problem requires the establishment of high standards of Community law in relation to child sexual exploitation, standards that also apply to the CEEC countries where the problems are even greater than within the Union. The age of consent varies between countries: 13 years in Spain and the Netherlands, 17 years in Northern Ireland and in the Republic of Ireland. So a child abuser can move quite easily between countries where the legislation provides for a lower age of consent. They can do this purely to avoid criminal sanctions. This also presents a considerable obstacle to developing common standards and comparative data protection.
Article 5(1) of the Commission text proposes that the penalties for abusing a child under the age of 10 years should be more severe. We reject this because any abuse of children is a criminal offence.
Finally, acquisition and possession of child pornography with the aim of handing it over to the law enforcement authorities should be made an offence. It is a criminal offence to own this pornography, and very often the people using it are only pretending they are collecting it for the police. I do not think we can believe that."@en1
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