Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-05-23-Speech-3-309"
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"en.20070523.22.3-309"2
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".
Madam President, Minister, Commissioner, the reports follow each other but are not alike, since we are at present going to deal with biodiversity.
Minister, this week will have been marked by the desire shown by the European Parliament to fight against the loss of biodiversity. On Monday, the report by our fellow Member, Mr Amadou, and the report on Life+ were debated and, today, we are examining two oral questions tabled ahead of the next meeting of the Conference of the parties to the Convention on international trade in endangered species of wild flora and fauna, the CITES. Our Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety, whose chairman I excuse for not being able to be here with us, questions the Member States’ negotiating method and asks the European Council what key objectives the Union will uphold during the fourteenth meeting of the Conference of the parties to the CITES Convention, which will be held, as you said, Madam President, in the Hague on 14 and 15 June 2007.
The CITES Convention is one of the oldest multilateral environmental protection instruments. It was adopted in 1973, in Washington, by States that were already anxious to go beyond the national regulatory frameworks. The aim was to preserve wild plants and animals from commercial overexploitation. The significance of this Convention compared with the other multilateral agreements on the environment is its great power of adaptation. It directly influences trade through supply, which it restricts. In very practical terms, it influences around 500 000 transactions – that is no small amount, 500 000 commercial transactions! – thereby restricting the overexploitation of biodiversity. With the coming on board of the various institutional partners, nearly 170 States, including our 27 Member States, of scientists and NGOs, the CITES Convention will have made it possible to prevent the removal of particularly endangered species and to save species such as the Siberian tiger, the blue whale and African elephants.
Of course, the challenges facing the Convention are many. On the one hand, they are structural. The Convention struggles, in fact, to find funding to match its ambitions. It has to deal with the over-consumption of natural species, some of which are not always listed. On the other hand, the Convention must take account of new data, including, of course, climate change. It must incorporate the ineffectiveness of certain instruments, such as the action plan for forest law enforcement, governance and trade, or FLEGT, with which everyone in this House is familiar. It must review also the decisions that have had a negative impact on certain species: for example, during the twelfth Conference of the parties, the permits for the sale of ivory originating from Botswana, Namibia and South Africa resulted in almost 20 000 elephants being decimated, according to estimates.
As part of the fight against the loss of species, the European Union must at all costs speak with one voice during the conferences of the parties to the Convention. In this connection, I should like to point out, Minister, that the European Union often abstains when decisions are taken because our Member States do not manage to come to an agreement, with the result that 27 votes are lost, and 27 votes is not a negligible amount; it is even often a large amount.
Therefore, Minister, we ask that the Council take account of Parliament’s resolution, which reflects the interests of the European people and conveys that which our citizens want us to defend within the context of this CITES Convention. Firstly, because the resolution points out certain requirements to the negotiators. Thus, the precautionary principle must be applied with the same rigour as that imposed by the European Union in other international negotiations on the environment.
Equally, the Union must demand transparency in the voting process and reject secret ballots, a practice that really exists, especially when it comes to listing species in annexes. In fact, the point is to modernise this slightly antiquated procedure, which no longer in any way meets the requirements of the citizens, who must be able to exercise their right to inspect the decisions that are taken on their behalf. We know that the NGOs criticise the EU Member States at every turn for not disclosing their votes and for voting in secret ballots on certain species. We consider this to be totally unacceptable and we call for transparency, because this Convention is special and because the Member States, as we know, have specific interests where some subjects are concerned.
The questions included in the agenda of the Conference must be submitted to the European Parliament. We do not expect anything less. Each time a Conference of the parties to the CITES Convention is announced, we put the same questions to the Council: we do not understand why we have not been consulted earlier, so that we know what positions the Council plans to uphold during the Conference.
I should also like to ask the Commission and the Council to involve our parliamentary delegation in the work of the Conferences so that we are not forced, as we usually are, to skulk around the corridors in the hope of gleaning some information from them, and that is when the Council and the Commission see fit to invite us! I therefore thank you for involving the European Parliament delegation in the work done on the Convention."@en1
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