Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-10-20-Speech-1-112"
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"en.20031020.8.1-112"2
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"Commissioner, Mr President, this issue is obscured by a great deal of North Atlantic fog. If you ask the intelligence services about the current state of play, a whole load of questions are raised. Let me say at the outset that – unlike you, Commissioner – I am not fundamentally opposed to European shipyards, which are undergoing a major crisis, specialising in scrapping thousands of ships from throughout the world, and doing so under strict environmental constraints, a situation utterly different from that which currently – and lamentably – prevails in India, where the worst conceivable environmental dumping is going on and endangering people’s health to a substantial degree. We certainly do not want that. It naturally follows that we have a lot of questions to put to the British government, but, in its absence, I will use you as my mouthpiece and ask whether these are actually warships. The reason I ask this is that I have had widely divergent information. I am given to understand that warships can be scrapped only in the United States. Or are they vessels used for transport and commercial purposes? How was the transaction conducted? Did one government deal directly with the other, or were international middlemen involved? What we need to know is why the work was not done in the United States. Moving ships across the North Atlantic costs money, of course, and there are enormous risks involved. Was it factored in to the calculations that one or other ship might sink? That would have been a catastrophe of the sort that one would rather not talk about.
Without wishing to tread on anyone’s toes, my second question is whether the country for which the ships were destined possesses the necessary infrastructures. Does it have the infrastructures for putting a ship in dry dock, and so on? These, Commissioner, are questions for you to answer; questions that you, as you have just mentioned, should concern yourself with. Is all this in accordance with the Basel Convention on the Export of Waste? We know, of course, that the Americans did not sign it. These questions all call for serious scrutiny before we can come to a conclusion, but, all things considered, I would not want to exclude the possibility of Europeans offering such services to a very high environmental standard. Whether or not a ship is towed across the Atlantic, whether or not it is possible to do that – these are questions to be considered by the experts. Our approach to this topic should be highly critical, but very much in our interests as an industrialised continent, and we cannot of course accept it being confused with other matters. All this I have said in order to drop a hint, and I hope that the interpreters understand what I mean by that."@en1
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