Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-09-27-Speech-2-016"
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"en.20050927.4.2-016"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, as others of my fellow Members have done, I too should like to thank my friend and colleague Mr Kreissl-Dörfler for the serious work he has performed and for the difficult attempt to put together a report on which we can all agree. Unfortunately, the Council has already made up its mind, and we take note of that, as we do of its absence here today, and it will most probably take no account of any suggestions emanating from Parliament.
I think that the Kreissl-Dörfler report improves the directive put before us, particularly in that it deletes the part about super-safe countries and increases the margin for appeal against any refusal.
Some major unresolved issues still remain, however, which we cannot sidestep. I am thinking in particular of the role of consular authorities, who should not be allowed to meet asylum seekers under any circumstances. There remains the issue that asylum seekers should not be held in detention centres. We have just visited Lampedusa and seen how the mixing of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants generates barbaric relations inside detention centres. In our opinion, these people should not be held in the same places; indeed, we believe that asylum seekers should never be shut up at all. If it is absolutely necessary, steps must be taken to ensure that they are not held in the same places and in any case not for six months.
In addition, we are concerned about the use made in the report of the safe third country concept, about the criteria for defining a safe third country, and also about how the list of such countries will be drawn up. To us this is an extremely important point: by definition, a safe third country obviates case-by-case assessment, in that we delegate our responsibility to another country that is considered safe according to rather flexible criteria. Asylum is not a concession: it is Europe’s moral and political duty and a right for men and women who are being persecuted or are fleeing from wars.
Which are these safe countries? According to the criteria, even Morocco or Belarus, for instance, could be considered safe countries, places that we have chosen to consider privileged partners, and this also results in a process of externalising the Union’s borders. I believe that safe third countries and the concept of safe third countries endanger the lives of asylum seekers, and that is something that we must not allow.
I also believe that Parliament has too little control; codecision will only apply when modifying the list of safe third countries. Mr Frattini says that the report has been arranged step by step. In my view, this step has not been bold enough: we could have aspired to and demanded much more. The harmonisation that we have produced is probably such that it even makes some national legislations worse."@en1
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