Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-06-13-Speech-4-010"
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"en.20020613.1.4-010"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I believe the Commission's draft and Mrs Petersen's report to have an important and twofold significance. This has to do, on the one hand, with their subject matter – traffic safety, which is an important issue to the European public. It also, of course, has to do with this report's role in the overall discussion - of which there has been a great deal - of the documents on European democratic governments and
better regulation.
I am most grateful to the rapporteur for taking an actual example to show how things could go and what roles are played by Parliament, the Commission and the interest groups – which some would call ‘lobbies’ – by industry and consumer protection groups, and so on. Surely it is right for MEPs to be suspicious of agreements such as these, as we are never quite certain how far the industry will go, and to what extent it will keep to what it has supposedly committed itself to? It is also understandable that industry is sometimes suspicious of MEPs, whose wisdom and expertise in these different fields is called into question. So I believe it to be right that we should try to go down the road of compromise – the way pointed, thankfully, by the rapporteur – not an empty compromise but one that really shows the way things can go.
Being members of this House, we are naturally torn between the obligations and tasks imposed on us by a parliamentary democracy and the knowledge that there are many details we really cannot get to grips with unless we are experts in a specific area. We are torn between trust and mistrust of industry's knowledge and also its willingness to be decisive in making things happen that may only be burdens to it and do not do anything for industry's profits. We are also torn between our responsibility in matters of principle and, at the end of the day, the responsibility many people see us as having for many of the details. I therefore think it right to call for a framework directive in this case in particular. I am all in favour of it being slimline, and we will certainly not argue about whether it should take up one page or one-and-a-half.
Mr Rübig was so fulsome in his praise of the Commissioner that I do not know how to add to it, but I find it perfectly understandable that the Commissioner should use a commitment to perhaps get us MEPs to take the middle way that he, as a democrat, believes to be the right one, and to get this House to pass a framework directive. I will conclude by emphasising that this is all the more the case as we are dealing here with the area of traffic safety, and, whilst there may well be a technical issue at the bottom of it, it is a technical issue that has an effect on human lives. Any technical issue capable of making people's lives better or saving them is, after all, one on which we MEPs should at least lay down some principles. I support the rapporteur's motion."@en1
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