Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-10-24-Speech-3-499"
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".
Madam President, Commissioner, I must firstly thank the Members who worked very closely with me on the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs and who helped me with their critical contributions, in particular Mr Guardans, Mr Demetriou and, last but definitely not least, Mr Correia. We all greatly miss Mr Correia who was a Member of the Socialist Group in the European Parliament and a fellow Portuguese Member. He died after having helped me with this report. I think that the best tribute I can pay him is a kind of public promise that I will try, through my presence in the European Parliament, to help realise his ideas on Europe as a project of ambition and vision and as a giant capable of bringing its culture of rights to the world. It is this tribute that I want to pay, here today, to our friend and colleague, Mr Fausto Correia.
I should like to briefly summarise the issues raised by this report. I must firstly stress that this report, like all other reports, is an open report: open to seeking and finding the best solutions. There are two fundamental benefits to this initiative by France and Germany, as underlined by the Commissioner. The first is that, by encouraging the recognition and supervision of alternative measures to prison sentences, we are promoting a political culture which will make the courts more likely to apply these measures. We are promoting the humanisation of criminal law in the Member States and the quality of European criminal law. The second benefit concerns the fact that this initiative will help to make criminal law increasingly European in terms of being more harmonised and less feudalised within the European space.
In reality, European integration, which took a fundamental step forward in the recent Treaty on which agreement was reached in Lisbon last weekend, is at a level which criminal law in the European space has not yet been able to match. It is essential that we increasingly promote a culture not just of mutual recognition, but also of harmonisation in criminal law in terms of the design of sentences, their method of enforcement, the relationship between offenders and society and even greater equivalence between the substantive and procedural criminal laws of Member States.
Article 6 of the Treaty on European Union, by referring to a set of fundamental principles forming the common principles of the European Union, clearly shows that this only makes sense if we increasingly have European criminal laws. Most of these principles are protected by criminal legislation. Specifically on this report, I should like to make just two or three comments which I regard as fundamental. Firstly, Parliament’s contribution has particularly underlined the need for the distribution of powers between the issuing State and the executing State. There is a clear logic to the State which exercises a given power applying its own laws thereto. Secondly, there is the principle that refusal is the exception, so that the future framework decision can be as effective as possible. Thirdly, there is the logic according to which it is impossible to adapt the nature of measures, otherwise the principle of strict penal legality will be called into question. Finally, there is also a need to safeguard the principle of hearing defendants in cases involving the revocation of a suspended sentence or the imposition of a conditional sentence.
I will end, Madam President, by saying that all this progress in European criminal law will, despite everything, soon seem very limited to us. Europe will only be achieved as a project when we can establish anthropocentric and cosmopolitan laws, which must include criminal laws that are more harmonised and less divided by borders."@en1
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