Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-06-13-Speech-3-179"
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"en.20010613.5.3-179"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, a year and a half ago, the oil tanker
broke up off the coast of Brittany, causing one of the largest oil slicks ever. Sadly, that was not the first, and will probably not be the last time we see this kind of pollution of the coast of one of our Member States.
Today, some of these ships are carrying oil, others hazardous substances, others illegal immigrants. Tomorrow they could just as easily be carrying weapons or terrorist groups. These dangers are the result of abolishing the borders and of the decline of our national navies, which, today, no longer have the resources to accomplish their tasks, one of the most important of which is protection of the coasts. If we are to restore maritime safety to our countries, then as in many other areas it is not so much new European regulations that we need as governments that pursue a policy founded on simple principles: independence in relation to energy, maintenance of a genuine national navy, lower levies and protection of borders, including maritime borders.
The French Minister for the Environment, for his part, saw no need to curtail his holiday in La Réunion. Did he underestimate the scale of the disaster? Or did he think it would be pointless to return? It is true that Mrs Voynet and her Green comrades are concerned with issues other than the environment. The number of seats the Socialists will hand to them at the next legislative elections, the legalisation of drugs, homosexual marriages, abortion, regularising the status of immigrants who have illegally entered France, protecting the life of murderers in the United States: with all these concerns, there is not much room left for the environment.
By contrast, our other leaders were very active. Mr Jospin went so far as to visit one of the beaches, carried by one of his friends so as not to dirty his shoes. They all vowed, rather belatedly, that this would never happen again. All the necessary measures would be taken, double hulls, breaking up pieces of floating wreckage, etc. Some even suggested launching a campaign to boycott Total, the only remaining French oil company. Naturally, the large American oil groups welcomed this happy initiative.
A year and a half later, all this activity has brought no real improvement. Compensation of victims is almost non-existent. Only 6% of the available money has been paid out. The main purpose of the IOPC Fund, the compensation fund set up by the oil companies, seems to be to pay the victims as little money as possible. These procedures, these counter-inquiries, these experts’ reports seem to be designed to discourage the most persevering of claimants, who retreat before the avalanche of procedures they are required to follow.
As for our coasts, they continue to be polluted by thousands of ships carrying dangerous waste. The 1996 conventions on compensation of damage caused by the transport by sea of noxious and hazardous substances and the 2001 convention, known as the Bunker Convention, on civil liability for pollution damage caused by bunker oil, have not been implemented, or indeed ratified.
What solution do the three reports before us today propose? Compensating the victims? Mr Esclopé, in his report, rightly notes that the IOPC Fund is not very effective. But it is questionable whether the solution lies in the creation of a new compensation body. The maritime safety of our countries? The proposals in Mr Sterckx’s report on the identification of ships, on their cargo and their access to ports, are entirely justified, but they only cover one aspect of the problem. As for the establishment of a European Maritime Safety Agency, called for in the third report, Mr Mastorakis is right to question the usefulness of creating, and I quote from the report, ‘a new Community bureaucracy’.
Once again, the Europe of Brussels appears to be restricting the freedoms of the Member States by setting up another administration. But freedom is not licence, and we should be quite clear about that. It is the natural prerogative of a state to fly its flag on a ship, as recognised by the international court at The Hague since the famous cases known as the Muscat Dhows Case and the Lotus Case. So we cannot protest if Liberia or Panama, for instance, make use of this attribute of their sovereignty. But the end result cannot be that our states are obliged to allow ramshackle ships operated by incompetent crews and posing serious risks to the environment to approach their coasts. They must have the right to visit and, if need be, to refuse access to or turn away any ship that penetrates the zone defined by the Montego Bay convention as an exclusive economic zone, i.e. the 200 sea-mile zone.
All these measures, however wise, are not sufficient to tackle the threats – meaning, of course, environmental threats – facing the coastlines of our countries. If we are to tackle them, perhaps we first need to ask a few embarrassing questions. Why, for example, is a French company forced to go to a foreign ship owner, flying a dubious flag, with a crew that can only be described as a floating ‘Babel’? The Communist trade union, the CGT, which has ruined the French shipyards, the governments that have increased the rate of compulsory levies by 15 points in 25 years, probably have the answer. Why is the oil we import not carried mostly via the oil pipelines, which would be much safer than any tanker?
Yet, the threats are not only environmental. The arrival on the French Côte d'Azur last February of a Turkish vessel filled with a thousand or so Kurds from Syria, misrepresented as Iraqi refugees, showed the French that in the Europe of Schengen and of Amsterdam there is hardly any more control of their maritime borders than of their terrestrial borders, even near a large military port. Any ship can, therefore, enter our territorial waters."@en1
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