Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-11-18-Speech-1-093"
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"en.20021118.5.1-093"2
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"Mr President, we at the European Parliament must respect the principles of the rule of law, which means that we must uphold judgments of our European Court of Justice. As we know, with regard to tobacco advertising, this court of law has previously nullified a directive on account of there being an incorrect legal basis. That does not surprise me, because during the debate of this first directive, the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market, under my chairmanship at the time, had clearly stated that the European Union had no powers to issue a directive of this kind. In short, the law has rights too. I should therefore like to thank Mr Medina Ortega warmly on his achievements as rapporteur on this occasion. I should like to stress straight away that I shall be backing him during the vote. After all, the rapporteur has ensured that the directive to be issued now is legally watertight. It is true that the European Union can impose a ban on tobacco advertising on the Member States if there is a clear cross-border effect. However, I should like to add that it seems to me to be necessary that the ban on tobacco advertising, if it has a cross-border effect, should be put on an equal footing across all Member States. Member States that take their own initiatives at present distort the internal market's organisation and often cause a competitive disadvantage for themselves. I would take the example of my own country, Belgium, and the sponsoring of major sports events in Belgium. Our country has already issued a law which bans any form of tobacco advertising from 2003 onwards. As you can see, this goes much further than the currently proposed European regulation. Is this wise? I think that a general European regulation, as proposed by our rapporteur, should, on account of its general application, ensure that unilateral measures with often unfortunate consequences are avoided in future."@en1
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