Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-05-18-Speech-2-044"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20100518.6.2-044"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:translated text |
"Ladies and gentlemen, there are refugees in the world who can neither return to their countries because the situation is too unstable, nor stay in a transit country because it has not signed the Geneva Conventions and they cannot, for example, work in that country.
What is happening is that, from our point of view and that of the legal service, this decision is part of the delegated acts, and, as such, we believe that it falls to the Commission to argue for the adoption of the delegated acts here, as guardian of the treaties, and not raise objections that are, currently, merely procedural. Above all, we believe that none of these issues must prevent us from achieving our common goal: that of resettling more refugees in the European Union.
The numbers are relatively limited: 200 000 per annum, and the problem has already been solved for some of these refugees – whose only option is to be given a new life in a third country – by actors on the international stage that resettle refugees: 80 000 by the USA and some by Canada, Australia, Brazil and Chile. Who is missing from that list? Europe is missing, that is who.
During the Swedish Presidency, the Council judiciously admitted that it was necessary to greatly increase the number of refugees being resettled in Europe, going so far as to talk about 100 000. The Commission has also judiciously reviewed some statements by the European Refugee Fund to make possible a more vigorous and robust policy for resettlement of refugees.
I currently have two reports in the name of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs: one codecision and one own-initiative. We have four new additions to correct the policies that are currently in place in the codecision; two of these, however, are procedural.
The first new addition is a dual approach. The Commission’s proposal on which we are working mainly argues for regional priorities and then, within the regional ones, priorities that I would call ‘humanitarian’. We saw fit to maintain these priorities but give them autonomy. In other words, we think that Europe must have intervention strategies in terms of resettling refugees, which are very important from a foreign policy point of view. These strategies must sometimes allow for intervention in certain areas of the world, open doors to a given country, or establish trust relationships in certain areas of the world. They must, however, give the Member States freedom to respond to situations in the rest of the world that are priority in humanitarian terms.
What situations are priorities? Victims of torture, women and children who are victims of sexual violence, or people who need to be resettled for serious health reasons, for example.
The second new feature is modulation. This aims to move from only 10 Member States that currently resettle refugees at European level, so that we can try to ensure that the other 27 Member States will start resettling them. To achieve this, we proposed increasing the sum to be assigned per refugee to the new Member States in the first year, decreasing it a little in the second and making it the same as the other Member States that resettle refugees from the third year onwards; this was conditional on the increased amount for the first years, which are the years in which it costs most to start a new resettlement programme, being used to develop a sustainable resettlement programme.
The other two new features are procedural. One gives the Commission the opportunity to start an emergency procedure to resettle refugees from a given area of the world – where there was a humanitarian disaster or a crisis situation – because the procedure that we had was being carried out on an annual basis and, clearly, disasters and humanitarian crises do not follow a timetable. The fourth new feature was that of the delegated acts, and here I must tell you very clearly, Mrs Malmström, that Parliament can take care of timetable arguments and procedural arguments very efficiently, and we promise to not take long to respond to delegated acts. We also promise that the prior consultation and debate that we proposed with, for example, the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Committee on Development, can prevent any differences of opinion between Parliament and the Commission regarding the regions that are resettlement priorities.
What we cannot accept is the Commission, as guardian of the treaties, telling us that delegated acts to which it has no legal objection must not be adopted within the framework of this decision, which is so important in foreign-policy and humanitarian terms, simply because the acts seem bureaucratic to the Commission when we say that they are not."@en1
|
| lpv:videoURI |
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples