Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-10-26-Speech-3-264-000"
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"en.20111026.19.3-264-000"2
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"Mr President, as part of this codecision process on resettling refugees, which has already gone on a long time, we visited refugee camps in Syria as representatives of Parliament, and it was difficult to explain to the people in the refugee camps how the process could take so long owing to an obstacle that essentially has nothing to do with the content of the codecision itself, which was adopted by Parliament with a large majority a year and a half ago, and which has also received support in debates from the Commission and the Council on a number of occasions.
It was difficult to explain that this process was blocked because of Article 290 of the Treaty of Lisbon, on delegated acts. This was something about which those refugees, some of the most vulnerable people in the world, clearly neither knew nor needed to know. However, there have been several attempts to resolve this issue. There was a proposal by the Hungarian Presidency in May, to which we responded with a counterproposal by Parliament itself in June, and we have been waiting until now for a response from the Council which at long last concludes the codecision that we initiated one and a half years ago, and which, among other things, enables an increase in the funding available to the Member States’ for making voluntary resettlements. It is important to add the word ‘voluntary’ here, as it is the Member States that decide to begin their processes of resettling refugees and decide on the numbers to be resettled by this process, so they do not have to fear any kind of imposition from the Commission or Parliament. All that is needed is for the Council to conclude the codecision on this issue.
In the meantime, people have already died, which we would have been able to address when emergency situations broke out in the Mediterranean had the codecision been adopted, along with its emergency mechanism for resettling refugees. Today, the only good news is that we have saved that part of the codecision by adopting it through a pilot project of this very Parliament.
Parliament, therefore, did its homework a year and a half ago, and continues to work ceaselessly on behalf of refugees, who are the most vulnerable people on the planet and whose numbers are relatively small.
I would like to finish by asking the Council three very specific things: firstly, what does the Council think of the counterproposal made by Parliament in June? Secondly, how does the Council intend to go about concluding this codecision? Thirdly, I would like to ask whether the Council is willing to fast-track negotiations in conjunction with Parliament and the Commission in order to close this file by the end of the Polish Presidency. If not, we will lose not one or two months, but two whole years of resettling refugees, with all the suffering that this entails for the people waiting and despairing in the refugee camps, who may run the risk of fuelling human trafficking networks."@en1
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