Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-04-08-Speech-2-156"
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"en.20030408.4.2-156"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, the report by Mrs Cerdeira Morterero on family reunification was adopted by the Committee on Citizens’ Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs against the votes of the Group of the European People's Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats, which considers the report to be utterly unacceptable. This is the third proposal presented by the Commission on this subject since 1999, and once the directive has been adopted by the Council, it will soon be transposed into the national law of every Member State.
We in the European Parliament are asked today to deliver our opinion on a solution to the problem of reunifying the families of non-EU citizens, a solution that is both humane and realistic. It gives people from non-EU countries the chance to live in and with their families in the European Union while also avoiding a drastic increase in the level of immigration into our Member States. After several years of hard bargaining with the Council, the Commission has now finally adopted a realistic and practicable approach.
I am, however, critical – as I was with the initial proposal – of the Commission’s decision not to differentiate between the various reasons for immigration. Accordingly, I call once again on behalf of my group for separate directives on family reunification – one for asylum-seekers, one for migrant workers and one for subsidiary protection. By dealing with subsidiary protection – that is to say the granting of temporary residence rights to people in need of protection – in a separate directive, the Commission has now taken a step in the right direction, a step we have been encouraging it to take. It would have been logical to do likewise for asylum-seekers and migrant workers.
Extending reunification to non-marital and same-sex partnerships and children belonging to people in these partnerships, for which Mrs Cerdeira Morterero argues in her report, is something that we categorically reject. Who, for example, is supposed to verify the existence of such relationships? I totally fail to understand why the door is being deliberately thrown wide open to abuse. I can only recommend to the ideologists of this House that they try to get in touch with those who work at the sharp end in the Member States. They are the ones who have to cope on a daily basis with unclear regulations and a considerable caseload of abuses.
If people-smugglers are already being paid huge sums of money by those who want to enter the European Union illegally, risking their lives in the process, it is easy to imagine the sort of money that will soon be changing hands to enable people to enter the EU quite legally as so-called partners. The Commission’s proposal that the reunification of these categories of people should be at the discretion of the Member States is not convincing either, because it gives too much scope, in my view, to individual countries in a united Europe with open borders.
Instead of supporting the realistic and practical approach which I proposed in my first report and which has since received widespread endorsement in the Council and the Commission, the left-wing majority are continuing to romp about here in their ideological playground. By persisting with their unrealistic proposals, they are playing into the hands of those Member States that have no wish to consent to codecision rights for the European Parliament in this domain.
In this specific case, I am in the unaccustomed position of welcoming the fact that we are only being consulted on this matter. The Council has already reached a political agreement to accept the Commission draft. The Council, at its meeting on 8 May, can therefore be expected to base its decision on the Commission’s draft, which is a more realistic document. For this reason, my wish for today and for the future is that our decisions should not be coloured by ideological party manifestos but that, in the parliamentary processes which are still pending, we should agree on constructive, practical and coherent policies that the people of our countries can endorse.
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