Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-03-10-Speech-3-269"
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"en.20040310.7.3-269"2
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".
Mr President, let me melodramatically apologise in advance. For some reason a nasty virus has descended upon me in the last three quarters of an hour so if I do not make a great deal of sense and if I leave early I hope the reasons are at least forgivable.
I would like to summarise where I see this legislation has improved or changed for the better during our deliberations. In a sense the proposal from the Commission had quite a faltering and uncertain start. I was struck as rapporteur by how weak the apparent support from a number of European airlines was for this measure. They expressed a fear, which I certainly shared at the beginning of the discussions, that the instrument being proposed and discussed here could, if mishandled, be a pretext for protectionist behaviour rather than, as is intended, a targeted instrument to deter unfair pricing and excessive use of subsidies elsewhere.
The original draft was a little too open-ended. It rather bluntly stated that the European Union would have the power to extend for the first time anti-dumping disciplines from the trade in goods to the trade in services, without a great deal of detail about how that would take place. Our efforts in Parliament during the first reading in particular have been to fill in some of the gaps, to make it a more usable and credible instrument, rather than a sort of blunderbuss threat which might arguably have been too crude to use at all.
To that end we are all pleased that the Council has adopted some of the amendments we tabled at first reading, notably, and probably most importantly, those specifying in the legislation itself that the Commission must develop a detailed methodology by which dumped, unfair prices are calculated so that there is a coherent and credible methodology to distinguish dumped prices from normal pricing.
I am very pleased the Council has adopted that. I am very grateful to the Commissioner and the Commission for accepting those amendments too. As rapporteur, I would have liked both the Council and the Commission to move a little further towards our position as adopted at first reading. I remain a little concerned that there is no caveat in the legislation to the effect that this instrument should only be used if significant material injury is inflicted upon European Union aircraft carriers. There is a theoretical, potential danger that this instrument will be used to pursue frivolous or insignificant cases. This instrument needs to be used sparingly and I would have preferred to have seen greater adoption of our wording, which targeted it at the really important cases.
Having said that, I accepted the wisdom of my wiser colleagues in the Committee on Regional Policy, Transport and Tourism, to which I am only a very occasional visitor, who told me in the debate ahead of the second reading that this was a good package to settle with. I happily did so, except on one issue, in a sense on behalf of the Commission, which had understandably expressed concern about the provisions of recital 5, and which suggested that this regulation would be subservient to existing bilateral agreements. I am extremely grateful to the Irish presidency for persuading its colleagues in the Council, according to all the accounts I have received, that the offending wording should be deleted so that a rigid hierarchy between bilateral instruments and EU instruments would not be established to the detriment of the latter.
Let me take the remaining seconds to thank the Commission services, which have been enormously helpful in providing a lot of technical detail to a complete ignoramus like me. I should like to thank the Commissioner for proposing this in the first place and accepting the final settlement, the Council and, most importantly, my colleagues in the Committee on Transport. I am, as I said before, an interloper from the trade community and it was certainly an interesting and useful exercise for me to see how trade policy and transport policy have in this case come together in an extremely satisfactory manner."@en1
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