Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-10-23-Speech-1-081"
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"en.20061023.16.1-081"2
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".
Mr President, Mr Frattini, ladies and gentlemen, what we have on the table are three documents: two regulations and one decision. I should like to draw the Chamber’s attention to five issues, the first of which is institutional, namely the absurdity of the legislative process.
We have three different legal documents subject to two different procedures: the regulations are subject to codecision and the decision to the consultation process. The three documents refer to the same situation; we do not have three Schengen Information Systems, we have one, on which we are making laws using different legal systems. This is an absurd situation that must not be allowed to continue. If the European Constitution had been adopted we would not be finding ourselves in this ridiculous situation.
This was a complex legal procedure which required everyone to work in a great spirit of cooperation. I should like to thank publicly the shadow rapporteurs and all the members of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs. I wish to thank in particular Mr Lax, Mrs Mastenbroek and Mrs Kaufmann for their invaluable help and for working under great pressure to secure an agreement at first reading.
The second point I wish to make is that, to my mind, this is a good outcome for Europe. This is because we have more security, better data protection and the system has been tightened up. Biometric data make it easier to identify people, so that a more reliable connection can be made between the person and the identity document, which serves to strengthen security standards. Furthermore, alerts can be tackled more intelligently, which we call the interlinking of alerts. This enables a policeman to distinguish between a less serious crime and an act that may be linked to a criminal network or to a series of crimes that require a more sophisticated security response. Not only are we managing information more intelligently, we are also helping the law enforcement bodies to guarantee security more effectively. With the three documents on which we are about to vote, we are helping to make our external border controls more effective and movement within the Community more secure.
Thirdly, I believe that this is a good outcome for the new Member States, which justifiably want to give their citizens the feeling that they are fully-fledged citizens with the same right to free movement as those in the rest of the Community. This is why we must not hold back the legislative process. There needs to be an agreement at first reading and once this is in place we will be in a position to adopt a legal basis by the end of 2006 as we have undertaken to do.
Fourthly, Mr President, I feel that this is a good outcome for Parliament, because we have managed to achieve most of what we had been fighting for, of which I should like to highlight the following: Community management of the central system, under the democratic control of the European Parliament and the legal control of the Court of Justice (the creation of a Community agency within five years, established in codecision with Parliament, is provided for); the fact that there is greater harmonisation of alerts in the Schengen Information System (SIS), whereby entry into the Schengen area can be refused (the Commission is invited to submit initiatives, within three years, aimed at achieving higher levels of harmonisation); the fact that European Arrest Warrants are stored in the SIS central system; the fact that we are using biometric data as a research field only after the drafting of a report to be submitted to Parliament on which Parliament will have its say; the fact that we have clearly strengthened the rules on data protection and the rights of individuals in relation to the system, the fact that the supervision system has been strengthened at both European and national level; and the obligation to draw up reports in order to increase transparency regarding the overall functioning of the system.
My fifth and final point, Mr President, is a remark to the Council and a vote of thanks to the Commission. I wish to thank the Commission, and in particular Mr Frattini, who worked closely with Parliament throughout the process and – let me stress this point – helped the Commission and Parliament to find a great deal of common ground. I should also like to thank the two Presidencies – of Austria and Finland – for the huge amount of work that they put into this process. I should particularly like to thank Mr Rajamäki, Finnish home affairs minister and current chairman of the Justice and Home Affairs Council, and all his team, and a special word of thanks for the chairman of the Schengen working group. People worked very hard and, to my mind, achieved success, both in terms of the legal solutions that we found and the institutional undertakings that we have made; for example, the Presidency has undertaken to channel all its efforts into adopting the framework decision on data protection in the third pillar by the end of the year.
Mr President, I should like to say, however, that the Council did not always do the right thing. It failed to honour the promises it made at the high-level informal trialogue in May held in Strasbourg, and this led to a major defeat for the Austrian Presidency. I hope that the Council does not do likewise with the compromise reached in the Brussels trialogue of 26 September. I say this because although we managed to reach an excellent agreement at the 26 September trialogue, 48 hours, just two days, before the vote on the compromise text at the Committee on Civil Liberties, the Council sought to open up the SIS to the secret services of the Member States on the basis of an initiative by one Member State. It must be said that, in terms of its actual content, this proposal makes no sense. We cannot, on the one hand, increase personal data protection requirements, which we did in the compromise text, and, on the other, open up access to the structures of the Member States, which by definition are not answerable, either partly or totally, to the authorities responsible for data protection. This paradox makes no sense. It is also ridiculous for procedural reasons, insofar as two days before Parliament voted on the text that had been agreed upon in the trialogue with the Presidency and Mr Frattini, attempts were being made to amend the text. One does not make changes to a negotiation and a compromise in 48 hours.
Relations between the European institutions should be characterised by loyalty and good faith. The President of Parliament is good to his word. We are ready to vote on a text that we managed to reach over many months and lengthy negotiations. I trust that the Council will also honour its commitment and that the new second generation SIS will be up and running, at the earliest opportunity, operating effectively and efficiently, and delivering security."@en1
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