International

It’s starting to become a trend. It takes an eternity for an agreement to be reached on citizens’ rights in Europe, while proposals to limit these rights are adopted in record time. You see this above all in the area of Justice and in relation to social policy. In my view, we have to reverse this order, first of all securing citizens’ rights, and only then speaking about measures which under certain circumstances might limit these rights.

In the area of Justice I’m negotiating with the Council of Ministers on behalf of the European Parliament on minimum norms for legal aid. In the Netherlands legal aid is under strong pressure as a result of spending cuts, while the cost of judicial procedures grows ever higher. In other European countries legal aid has already become utterly inadequate, and wealthy people accused of crimes have far more of a chance when they come before a court than do people who can’t afford to pay a lawyer, or a good one at least, themselves. Pure class justice. To date we haven’t made much progress in the negotiations, because around half of the member states want to build in as few guarantees as possible. Meanwhile the Ministers of Justice voted some years ago that you could be extradited to another member state more-or-less automatically if the country in question was prosecuting you for a criminal offence. I know of Dutch citizens who have been extradited to Poland and have not been offered a lawyer, or at best one who speaks only Polish. Not all that useful, if you’re accused of a crime for which you could face a sentence of years in prison.

You see the same thing in relation to social policy. The Posting of Workers Directive has been in force since 1997. In that measure it states that workers posted in another member state enjoy the same rights as do workers from that member state in relation to a number of aspects, but that their social security and their pensions continue to be regulated via their country of origin. This makes workers from low wage countries who are posted in the Netherlands a bit cheaper than Dutch workers. That’s not too bad if we’re talking about a short posting of say a few weeks, but things are different should the posting last several months. To address this, the definition of ‘posting’ must be tightened up. Originally the Commission was supposed to be bringing a so-called ‘mobility package’ forward this month, in which the problem of exploitation through posting would be tackled. For reasons which are unclear, this has now been postponed until some time next year. And once it is brought forward, we can still look forward to endless negotiations.

It’s a long time since the expression ‘Europe of the Citizens’ was launched. If ‘Brussels’ is to take this idea seriously, then it’s honour bound in the future to first of all reach agreement on the rights of citizens, before it moves on to proposals which could undermine them. In the area of Justice this means full agreement on the rights of accused persons. In social policy the EU must at last recognise the Council of Europe’s European Social Charter and in addition come to an agreement on reforms to prevent exploitation on the labour market.