Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-11-30-Speech-4-052"
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"en.20061130.6.4-052"2
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"Madam President, first of all, allow me to thank our rapporteur, Mrs del Castillo Vera, and to congratulate her on her excellent report, especially since it is structured around clear sets of themes designed to improve monitoring of the Lisbon Strategy. I think, moreover, that one issue in particular ought to get us moving: that of reviewing the Community Patent.
For too long, we have been saying, as Mrs del Castillo Vera said just now, that it is crucial for innovation to be promoted via harmonisation at European level. Now, what we are saying needs to be heard. We talk about producing better legislation, and the scope of such legislation is vast. There is also, however, cause to be surprised that Europe is so far behind in terms of innovation. Bearing in mind, however, that a patent costs on average EUR 46 700 in Europe compared with EUR 10 250 in the United States, I think that we know, unfortunately, why this is so. Charging as much as that is the best way of stifling innovation in Europe’s small and medium-sized enterprises. This cost is utterly prohibitive. It is therefore a matter of urgency to get the Council to think again and help extricate our companies from this unfortunate situation.
I should now also like to emphasise another important point that we ought to have taken up in this report, namely the Agreement on Public Procurement. In the process of being reorganised under the auspices of the World Trade Organisation, this Agreement offers the 36 signatories, including our 25 Member States, access to their partners’ public procurement markets. Nonetheless, a number of these partners are not playing by the rules. One has only to look at what the United States and Canada do. By means of national provisions, they exclude from the scope of the Agreement those public procurement markets that they reserve for their SMEs, even though these countries can put themselves forward in the public procurement markets of the 25 Member States.
I find it unacceptable that the progress made in transatlantic relations is all in the same direction. We therefore have a duty to promote a European Small Business Act on the model of that in place in the United States since 1953. We might be said to be 50 years behind. You will agree that enough is enough. It remains for us to come up with better legislation."@en1
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