Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-10-04-Speech-4-009"
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".
Mr President, I do not think I will take up the whole five minutes.
This is a third reading and it is a conciliation procedure that we have been following for a long time. I would like to welcome the dialogue that has existed between the Council, the Commission and the European Parliament, which has been very helpful. Naturally, the result of a conciliation is never entirely good for all parties. It is usually fairly good, but with a few drawbacks.
I believe that of the first amendments presented by the European Parliament at first reading, the other two institutions have accepted some important amendments. For example, taking into account in product safety not only the producers’ liability but also that of the distributors; clear information on the possible risks in the languages of the different States of the Union; faster exchange of information; greater cooperation between Member States to prevent dangerous products from reaching the market; and also, the withdrawal of products which are considered dangerous, even if they are already being marketed. Furthermore, although not in the form that our colleagues from the United Kingdom wanted, an amendment aimed at including the special nature of several charities in the United Kingdom was accepted. I believe that a major part of the European Parliament’s proposals were included.
However, not all of them were included, and at second reading we presented only seven amendments which intended to include what had not been accepted by the other institutions. These amendments referred to something very important for us: the inclusion of the services in a proposal on which the Commission is working, the results of which it is committed to producing in 2003. I believe this is a very important proposal for us, because safety of services should rank on the same level as the directive we are reviewing today.
We also need to take account of the precautionary principle; this means that when there is a well-founded suspicion that a product is not safe, we should apply this principle of precaution which people talk so much about and which is seldom applied in reality. And the possibility that there is an external certificate which supplements the official certification. There is also an agreement on comitology which in this case is not what Parliament wanted either, but there is a proposal of continued and regular information to the European Parliament and the Council.
Some matters which caused us concern in the final proposal were also clearly accepted.
I would just like to emphasise a matter proposed by the Commission itself at the beginning, which is the ban on exports to Third World countries of products which are not considered safe in Europe. This proposal was not accepted by Parliament by a few votes, and is naturally not included in the final document. I have to say, as rapporteur, that this is perhaps what concerns me most. I believe that we run a real risk that, as we are seeing daily, unscrupulous people export to Third World countries products that are not safe. This is an issue that is of enormous concern to me. We have the verbal undertaking of the European Commission that there will be very strict controls to ensure that this does not occur, but it would have been safer for it to be included in the proposal and for there to be no risk of exporting products which we Europeans consider dangerous to Third World countries.
Therefore, Mr President, despite the rapporteur’s great regret that the express ban on the export of unsafe products to the Third World has not been included in the directive, I believe, as I said in the beginning, that it is not the best proposal for the Council and the Commission, perhaps it is not the best one for Parliament either, but it is the result of a conciliation procedure in which a very fruitful dialogue has indeed taken place between all the institutions and with which I am very satisfied."@en1
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