Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-03-13-Speech-2-367"
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"en.20070313.26.2-367"2
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".
Madam President, even though votes have wings and fly from one party to another, I am interested in the question of illegal hunting rather than in the question of votes.
I trust that, with the visit by senior officials from the Environment DG, the Maltese authorities will be persuaded to comply fully with the provisions of Community legislation.
I think that it is impossible that the honourable members do not know the answers to the questions they have already asked. They know that whatever has been agreed for the integration of countries into the European Union is public knowledge. There are no secret agreements and I am certain that the honourable members know this full well, because they have been in the European Parliament for two years now. Consequently, I cannot understand exactly what these secret documents are. There is no mystery here. Everything that has been agreed is public knowledge. For Malta it was agreed that there would be a transitional period on the question of bird trapping. There is no agreement on anything else.
As far as the derogations are concerned, the right to request a derogation is granted in Article 9 to all the Member States. Malta too can request a derogation under the provisions of Article 9. Malta did not request a derogation, it simply made a derogation on its own, we took it to Court and we have been waiting for it to respond since July 2006. It has still not sent us a reply.
Mr President, the Commission welcomes the active intervention of Parliament's Committee on Petitions. The visit by the members of the Committee on Petitions to Malta in May 2006 was fruitful and the report on the visit confirms that, in this instance, the Commission and the European Parliament are of the same opinion.
The Commission used the infringement procedure because the Maltese authorities are still allowing spring hunting, in breach of Community legislation. Malta is clearly behaving in breach. It started with the derogation in the 2004 hunting season and continued in subsequent years and, to all appearances, it is continuing this year.
For the Commission, the priority is to prevent systematic and generalised infringement of Community legislation on birds. That is why we intend – as I said earlier – to extend the existing infringement proceedings pending for the 2004 case to the general infringing practices of Malta. In this way, we shall be in a position to address and prevent future infringements; this will happen at the Commission meeting on 21 March.
As far as the present situation is concerned, on 28, 29 and 30 March a Commission delegation will travel to Malta to discuss the case in greater detail. Explanations will be requested from the competent national authorities and it will be made clear to them that they must comply with Community legislation without delay. If the Maltese authorities stick to their guns, the Commission will proceed to the next state of the procedure, which is to issue a reasoned opinion, and it will be able to take recourse to the Court of Justice straight afterwards.
The procedure which the Commission can follow – for any case, I am not just talking about Malta – is, within the framework of the main referral and, once the reasoned opinion has been issued in accordance with Article 228, to seek an injunction ordering the Member State to stop its infringing behaviour. The Court may issue an injunction if it finds that there is an urgent need to prevent irreparable damage as a result of blatant infringement of Community law for which there is prima facie evidence.
In Malta's case, the Commission would have been unable to seek an injunction before now, without first extending – as I said earlier it was going to do – the subject of the 2004 case so that it also covered subsequent years (2005, 2006 and, possibly, 2007). The Court would have dismissed the request, given that the risk of irreparable damage would already have passed. The application for an injunction would have been dead letter, given that it would have only referred to the infringement in 2004. It is for precisely this reason – from a legal point of view and in order to prevent future infringements – that we felt it advisable that the current proceedings should be extended at the Commission meeting on 21 March."@en1
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