Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-03-11-Speech-1-112"
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"en.20020311.8.1-112"2
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"Mr President, let me say one thing at the outset, namely that I am no great friend of ombudsmen. I still feel that we, as elected members of Parliament, should be the primary ombudsmen of the people of Europe. Why do we need a Data Protection Supervisor? My esteemed fellow MEP, Timothy Kirkhope, justified it on the basis of the Charter of Fundamental Rights and by reference to data protection's significance. I do not believe that one can argue in this way, as we would next need a family ombudsman, a women's ombudsman and a children's ombudsman as well. All these groups have an important place in the Charter of Fundamental Rights.
In Schleswig-Holstein, the province of the Federal Republic of Germany from which I come, we have developed a veritable abomination; we even have a bicycle ombudsman. Anyone, though, who believes that cyclists come off better out of this, even in the planning of the budget, is, as we say, barking up the wrong tree. No, data protection really is important, and the reason why it is so to us is that we parliamentarians find monitoring difficult – even the monitoring of the Commission, and especially of what goes on within it – and so, of course, we need an auxiliary person in this field. He or she, as Mr Ceyhun rightly said, must be based in Brussels, where he or she is to carry on the work of monitoring.
Let us move on to remuneration. No matter how important the position may be, I really cannot see that an ombudsman, who is to monitor this data, should, in salary terms, be on the same footing as a judge at the European Court of Justice. Why that should be the case completely eludes me. A judge at the Court of Justice occupies a significantly superior and more important position. The judges are, in any case, the guardians of our treaties. Why, then, should we pay a data protection supervisor as much as a judge at the ECJ? I think that in this respect our yardsticks of value have shifted a bit over the years, and they need to be put back in order. We should rather think about bringing the Ombudsman back to the right pay level instead of going straight ahead with allocating too much to the next position. On this point, I appeal for a bit more of a sense of reality."@en1
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