Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-12-12-Speech-3-268"
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"en.20011212.9.3-268"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, after the sinking of the oil tanker Erika on 12 December 1999, this Parliament and the Council requested a significant strengthening of the Community rules on maritime safety and the prevention of pollution. The Commission responded quickly to these demands by presenting the three proposals known as the Erika I package, which we are still debating two years after that disaster, although we have finally reached agreements on each of them in Council, which are definitive in the case of the first two.
In the case of the modification of the Directive on the common rules and standards for organisations which classify, inspect and examine ships on behalf of the maritime administration, from the outset, the parliamentary amendments to Commission’s original proposal focussed, above all, on the practical aspects of the application of the classification system, on improving the transparency of the information relating to the quality of inspections, on the periodic auditing of those organisations and the withdrawal of their Community recognition in the event of serious accidents, as well as the financial liability of those organisations for damages and accidents where is has been proved that that there has been negligence in inspections.
After the Council’s adoption of its common position, we moved on to second parliamentary reading, where we insisted on issues relating to resolving the conflicts of interest which may arise between classification societies or organisations and the owners and/or charterers of ships, as well as on financial liability in cases of negligence or omission in judgements.
When the Council communicated that it could not accept all Parliament’s amendments, we moved on to the stage of conciliation between the representatives of the two Community institutions. The discussion focussed firstly on the issue of the conflict of interests, where the Council finally accepted that a classification organisation must not be controlled by owners or builders of ships or by other persons or entities which are commercially involved in the construction, equipping, repair or operation of ships. It also focussed on the idea that, at the point of requesting recognition, the classification society and its inspectors should commit themselves in writing, on an individual basis, to not accepting regulatory duties where there is a risk of a conflict of interests and, in particular, where those societies are the owners of the ship which is to be inspected, or have commercial, personal or family connections with those owners.
For its part, the parliamentary delegation, while considering that much of the work of the inspectors should be done by the maritime administration and that the latter should have subsidiary responsibility, accepted that it should not be obligatory for the Member States to establish a maximum limit for the financial liability of classification societies in the event of damages due to slight negligence in inspections, although in the event that those Member States wish to establish that maximum limit, that limit should not be less that EUR 2 million and EUR 4 million respectively, depending on whether the damage only affects material objects or also people.
However, the delegations of the two institutions considered that this issue should be examined within the framework of the evaluation report, which the Commission will present within three years, on the economic impact of the liability regime and, in particular, its consequences for the financial equilibrium of recognised organisations. If necessary, the Commission will present, in the light of the said evaluation, a proposal for a modification of this directive which deals specifically with the principle of liability and the maximum limit for the financial contribution.
In conclusion, I believe that the European Parliament should be satisfied with the final result of the conciliation, since the majority of our amendments have been incorporated, either fully, in a revised form or in spirit, into the joint text, and we therefore propose that this latter text be approved by the House at third reading.
Finally, I would like to draw the attention of the relevant legal authorities to the fact that certain people harmed by the Erika accident are yet to receive any compensation for the damage suffered, despite the fact that two years have passed since this tragic event took place."@en1
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