Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-02-17-Speech-4-050"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20000217.3.4-050"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:translated text |
".
Mr President, legislating in criminal matters is often countered, wrongly, with arguments of individual freedom and security. Is one secure when freedoms are no longer guaranteed? Is one free when security is no longer assured? Modern criminal law revolves around the quest for a balance, a dialogue between security and freedom. And this dialogue is open-ended; it adapts to the demands of the day.
Nowadays, certain forms of crime are cross-border crimes and it is, of course, in the interests of the Member States to improve cooperation so that they can crack down on them. But the Council’s draft leaves a lot to be desired and attracts criticism on several counts. First, the form: the draft convention is vague in the extreme, and this is totally incompatible with the objective of legal certainty in a modern society. It is not just a question of style. We are taking about criminal law here and criminal law has to be interpreted by the letter. Then the content: the Council draft fudges the obvious difficulty caused by widely differing legal systems, varying practices and a total lack of legal public service standards in certain Member States of the Union. It makes provision in article 9 for prisoners held in custody to be transferred from one state to another despite the fact that guarantees differ. I should like to stress this point because it is paramount.
We must not forget that several tens of thousands of people are currently held in custody in the European Union without having stood trial and that, in some states, custody is abused and used as a means of extorting confessions. It is nothing less than legal torture. Other European countries, on the other hand, do not accept confession as sufficient proof of guilt.
It is this diversity in our criminal policies which we have to address and legislating properly means looking for genuine legal convergence criteria and facing up to the reality of prisons in Europe, which are often overcrowded places outside the law which are a disgrace to the conception we have of ourselves. Mr President, as you know, all of our countries abolished the death penalty years ago, but with nearly a thousand suicides a year in our prisons, they have not really abolished it?"@en1
|
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples