Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-12-11-Speech-1-137"
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"en.20061211.14.1-137"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, regarding all the positions that have been voiced, even the most critical ones, and those who are preparing to vote for the common position, without supporting a package that improves it, I should just like to say that there is freedom in this Parliament and that we shall remain on good terms as before.
There is, however, an argument that I have to demolish. Somebody spoke of hundreds of dangerous substances that would be freely released on the market, and someone even said that 90% of dangerous substances would be authorised: in other words, the compromise puts in place a kind of licence to kill. All this distortion is supposed to have happened during the last night of negotiations. That is not true. I can only give you an estimate, because only REACH will tell us the actual numbers, but the most reliable estimates say that roughly 2 500 substances will be subject to the authorisation procedure.
With the compromise, there should be less than 200 substances that can be authorised on the basis of adequate control – which is not a licence to kill, but involves a risk assessment. In any case, because of the way in which we have restructured the compromise, even for these substances a substitution plan must necessarily be submitted where an alternative exists, or a research and development plan where there is no alternative.
Nobody, therefore, can deny the fact that all substances that are authorised will be included in a process that sooner or later will lead to their substitution. If anyone was thinking that substitution would be made compulsory by decree, they would be voting on something that I have never put forward, either at first reading or in the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety.
What I really cannot accept is what has been said about the negotiating process having been non-transparent and undemocratic. I met the shadow rapporteurs before and after all the negotiating rounds; I kept them informed; and, right up to the last round, there was very broad agreement on the negotiating mandate that I took to the negotiating table.
Lastly, I should like to thank my friend Carl Schlyter for having returned the apple from a year ago. I shall eat it tomorrow. He, however, kept it, and he showed me something in a glass jar that is a real ecological disaster in the making. Still in the fruit and vegetable department, I should like to tell you something that I was taught by my old trade union negotiating master. He was an old worker who had been through a lot and had made plenty of sacrifices. He told me, ‘You must not be like a walnut, which is hard on the outside and soft inside; you have to be like a peach, soft on the outside and hard inside.’ That is the negotiating line that I follow."@en1
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