Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-07-05-Speech-3-151"
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"en.20000705.4.3-151"2
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"The European Parliament has just shown, by refusing to grant itself the power to investigate the ‘Echelon’ global spy system, that it in fact has little interest in protecting European interests and that the majority of the House is obeying other, higher priority considerations.
Luckily, we still have sovereign states in Europe to defend European interests, states with sovereign justice which can unilaterally open an investigation into the activities of this network, a leftover from the Cold War which has now been turned into an industrial spy tool at the expense of certain companies and certain Member States in the European Union. Clearly, for the majority in this House, transparency and the fight against distortion of competition are the stuff of words, not deeds. I hope that other Member States will follow France's example.
It is a crying shame that the Conference of Presidents has decided, at the instigation of its Socialist and Christian Democrat majority, to put the lid on an important debate. It is likewise a crying shame that the President of our Parliament, Mrs Nicole Fontaine, felt compelled to prevent the chairman of the Group of the Greens, Mr Paul Lannoye, from reminding the House of the huge difference between a temporary committee of inquiry and a temporary committee before the vote: the first is a serious investigative tool, as the parliamentary committee of enquiry into the mad cow crisis demonstrated; the second is merely a smokescreen and will not brook any investigation into the Echelon installations located in several Anglo-Saxon Member States, including Great Britain and Germany.
If ever we needed a clear illustration of the fact that real European interests are best defended by fully sovereign, resolute Member States, rather than by an assembly which is cut off from the people and indifferent to the threats to which they are exposed, then the European Parliament's dodging of the debate on the Echelon global spy system is it."@en1
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