Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-06-30-Speech-1-035"
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"en.20030630.6.1-035"2
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".
Mr President, I hope I will not use up all these five minutes. This procedure has to do with an application for the waiver of Mr Cohn-Bendit’s parliamentary immunity made by the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Frankfurt on the basis of charges laid by a member of the Hessen
parliament. In these charges, Mr Cohn-Bendit is accused of obstructing the course of a prosecution, in that – as stated in newspaper reports – he, together with others, a number of decades ago now, helped a Mr Klein, a terrorist alleged to have taken part in the OPEC attack in Vienna, to flee to France.
In the normal course of events, Parliament would comply with such a request when it was made. There were, however, a number of peculiarities, which led the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market to take a somewhat different approach to this matter. One reason why it did so was that the original application submitted to us was – let me put it frankly – relatively flimsy; that is to say, its substance did not amount to very much. The result of this was that, in the summer of 2000 – only a few weeks after the application was made to us – the then chairman of our committee, Mrs Ana Palacio, wrote a letter to the German authorities asking for further detailed information. The German authorities supplied this further detailed information after two more years had elapsed – that is how long this process took – and this meant that our committee could then rule on the matter.
I myself had, as rapporteur, originally proposed that, in this specific case, a conditional waiver might be considered, as is provided for in our Rules of Procedure, but – as I mentioned earlier – there is a whole array of peculiarities associated with this case, and these meant that the great majority on the committee saw it as right and proper not to waive immunity in this specific case. Such was the prevailing opinion.
One of the reasons for this is that, as regards at least some of the things Mr Cohn-Bendit may have got up to at the time, he did them at the behest of the German internal secret services, or with their direct or indirect involvement; it is in any case quite remarkable that the secret services should involve themselves in such things, while, on the other hand, the law enforcement authorities of the same country seek to take action against them. Another point was that Mr Cohn-Bendit indicated that it was him alone against whom investigations were in progress, rather than against all the others named in this newspaper article as possible accomplices. The third point has to do with the proceedings against the terrorist Mr Klein, which have now run their course, and in which the judge, in stating the grounds on which his judgment was based expressed admiration for what Mr Cohn-Bendit had done and depicted it as a typical example of what constructive help could be given to enable such people to break free from terrorist circles.
Against this background, the committee came to the conclusion that the special circumstances of this case mean that the waiver of immunity does not appear to be justified. I would like to make it quite clear that this does not mean that we are accusing the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor’s Office of
that is, of criminal proceedings intended to prejudice Mr Cohn-Bendit’s political activities. That is something that I too repeatedly opposed in the debate in the committee, quite simply because, as German law on immunity stands, a German public prosecutor’s office simply cannot do otherwise; it is not permitted even to open a file and commence investigations before a definite decision has been taken on the waiver of immunity. Taking the overall circumstances of this case into account, however, it seems appropriate to us – particularly in view of the European elections being not that far off – that immunity should not be waived in this case. I ask the plenary to endorse the committee’s proposal."@en1
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"fumus persecutionis,"1
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