Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-09-06-Speech-4-010"
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"en.20070906.2.4-010"2
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"Mr President, I would like to start, on behalf of the Committee on Legal Affairs, by thanking Ms Patrie for her cooperation and work together on this report. Clearly, the Committee on Legal Affairs welcomes very much the Green Paper and is grateful that the Commission has waited for Parliament’s opinion.
The word that runs through my committee’s opinion is coherence, and the need for coherence. We see this very much as part of the ‘better law-making’ agenda, which was discussed in this House earlier this week, but also as coherence across internal market legislation and across into the whole area of civil and commercial law, and contract law is very much part and parcel of that.
I would have to start by saying that there are some of us who, in dealing with this matter in the Legal Affairs Committee, have perhaps begun to regret the passing of what, in the previous legislative term, was our joint Committee for Legal Affairs and the Internal Market. It is good that consumer affairs are now dealt with by the same committee, but it is perhaps a shame that we have lost that focus on the internal market and civil and commercial law. That clear focus has been somewhat fractured. In the past, we, as a Parliament, have been very quick to condemn the Commission for a lack of joined-up thinking, and we must not ourselves now be guilty of the same difficulty. That is why the Committee on Legal Affairs is so clear that in dealing with this review we must keep an eye on the wider context of contract law and civil and commercial law as a whole.
In that respect, I must of course refer to the work on the common frame of reference to do with contract law. Much work has been done on that in the past and our committee hopes that much work will continue to be done on it in the future. That is absolutely essential to the opinion that we have delivered.
The contract law project is at the heart of better law-making, and arguably this review of the acquis should be the jewel in that crown. They are inextricably entwined and, even if the Member States are reticent about the whole of the contract law project, this Parliament is not and will not be in the future, and looks to the Commission to pursue that work together.
Of course, with consumer law, it is very difficult. We have all said that we want more harmonisation, and that seems to be the general tenor of the responses received. But consumer law needs to be very much accessible and understandable to our citizens for our internal market to work. Both sides of the bargain need to understand their rights and obligations.
In a national context, consumer law has grown up over the years, perhaps sometimes as a result of experiences at national level – often bad experiences, unfortunately – and also within a certain cultural context. That means that the consumer law that we all know in our national environment is a law that has some resonance between us and our citizens. It is accepted. People know what it is about. But how do we get that same resonance, that same understanding, that same accessibility at European level? That is what we have got to strive to achieve in any horizontal instrument if we are to give consumers across the internal market the confidence that they obviously currently still lack in order to use the internal market much more.
Now, it is also clear from what I have said that we are concerned, as a committee, that we make sure that the consumer acquis works together with other European law instruments, specifically private international law instruments like Rome I.
We cannot go on for ever having this battle about whose law shall apply. We need, therefore, to have the contract law project, the common frame of reference. We need a horizontal instrument, and we need to aspire to what some have called the ‘blue flag’ giving us European terms and conditions of trade and European consumer and contract provisions that will really make our internal market work."@en1
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