Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-04-19-Speech-1-052"
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"en.20040419.5.1-052"2
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"Mr President, exactly seven years have passed, and still neither the Council nor the Commission have proved themselves capable of devising a procedure to implement Article 7, an article once trumpeted abroad, at the time of the Treaty of Amsterdam, as a vital policy innovation in the EU Treaty. The lack of definite procedural rules, though, means that the paper asserting the values of the EU has to be patient. Without such a procedure, the whole article remains a paper tiger. Such a situation is not exactly calculated to make the European Union more credible in the eyes of its citizens; you are all aware to what a depth that credibility has fallen in all our Member States. Putting it politely, I have to say that I am disturbed by the Commission communication that this report takes as its starting point. It is extremely disturbing that the Commission quite obviously does not want to impose penalties on Member States in the event of serious breaches of the Treaties. It evidently wants to fool us into believing that everything in our garden is lovely and is going to stay that way.
What else can it mean when the Commission, on page 14 of its communication, states bluntly – and I quote – that ‘it will not be necessary to apply penalties pursuant to Article 7(3) of the Union Treaty and Article 309 of the EC Treaty’? Such an absolution of responsibility would markedly diminish our own high expectations of our shared values and, ultimately, the standard of protection for fundamental rights and values in the EU. It also reminds one of the oft-used repressive phrase to the effect that what is not allowed cannot happen.
Even more serious is the Commission’s ostrich-like and nonchalant attitude to the protection of fundamental rights in time of war, and this is where the real scandal lies. The real scandal is the way in which the Commission virtually serves up fundamental rights in the EU in time of war on a silver platter. Let me quote from page 8 of the Commission communication: ‘On the contrary, a serious breach presupposes that the danger should have become a concrete fact.’ Purely hypothetically, the adoption of a law abrogating procedural safeguards in time of war would be a clear risk. Actually using such a law, on the other hand, would be a serious breach.
That really is something to be savoured; the Commission regards a law, in a Member State, abrogating fundamental rights, as no more than a clear risk rather than as a serious breach, without even mentioning the possibility of penalties. No, this is not on. This represents a point beyond which Parliament cannot allow the Commission to persist in going against the flow of fundamental rights, and so I am glad that Parliament has taken the initiative, in the shape of the Voggenhuber report, so that now, seven years after Amsterdam, something is at last being done.
In relation to this, I have proposed a number of amendments aimed at making the draft text more precise. In particular, these relate to the obligation placed on the EU by the Convention’s draft constitutional treaty, in its Article 3(4) in Part I and in Article 193(1) in Part III, to abide by international law, and I think that the Iraq war, which was contrary to international law, and all the misery inflicted on that country by the occupying forces, is evidence of the need for further tightening up of the report’s motion for a resolution."@en1
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