European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights

Speech delivered on Thu 12th Oct 2006

Mr President, I am delighted to congratulate Parliament's two rapporteurs, Mrs Gál and Mrs Kósáné Kovács, for the excellent work that they have done, and also to congratulate Commissioner Frattini for the forceful way in which he has supported this exercise. Having been not so happy with him in a debate yesterday on PNR, I am very happy with him now. I would also like to have addressed my thanks to the Council, but of course they are not here.

This Fundamental Rights Agency is not just another European body. I believe that it will help reassure EU citizens that human rights are being upheld by the 'Brussels bureaucrats' and by EU governments when they are implementing European law. It will thus increase confidence in the European Union, and I think it is therefore a very appropriate 50th birthday present for the European Union to give itself in the run-up to March 2007.

I hope it will also help stop 'gold-plating' of EU directives, which some governments are rather prone to. They take a European law and when they transpose it into national law, they add things which have been sitting in a drawer in a ministry. Hopefully, we might see some curbing of that. But it is also essential to include matters of justice, security and policing, since, by their nature, police, judicial cooperation and criminal law measures, however desirable, are the most likely to raise concerns about human rights. For instance, we have the European arrest warrant but we still do not have the accompanying procedural guarantees for people facing charge and trial, which have long been promised.

I do not believe that this undermines the Council of Europe, and I fully agree with Michael Cashman on this: it intensifies the support for human rights in Europe, but we also need to include competence in relation to Articles 6 and 7 of the Treaty. We have to intensify the peer review and monitoring function for human rights within the European Union if we are to increase mutual trust and, therefore, provide a basis for mutual recognition of judicial decisions.