Rajat ylittävistä vahingonkorvausvaateista
31.01.2007
Limitation periods in cross-border disputes involving personal injuries and fatal accidents (debate)
Wednesday, 31 January 2007 - Brussels
Piia-Noora Kauppi, on behalf of the PPE-DE Group . ??? Mr President, the rapporteur has done excellent work with this report. There is much to applaud in this initiative. This, like our rapporteur said, is a practical solution to a practical problem. For one, it concerns one of the unfinished areas of the single market: how people???s rights travel with them when they exercise their four freedoms inside the Union. The European Parliament must point out any anomalies and invoke its Treaty rights to prompt the Commission into action. Secondly, it concerns justice and home affairs. People need as much certainty as possible about their rights and obligations in order to engage in any society. Engaging across borders in always going to be more uncertain than doing so at home but we have a duty as EU legislators to address these concerns. The mere fact that the disparate national laws do not allow for a quick uniform solution is no excuse for inaction.
The European Parliament is doing its part by opening the debate today. The Commission should follow with a proposal and the Member States should assume their sovereign responsibility and enact the necessary changes, employing the passerelle clause of the Nice Treaty if needed.
However, we have to be careful how we approach this. While my group strongly supports the report of Mrs Wallis, we cannot support her amendments to it. We believe it is too early in this report to point towards overly-harmonised and specific definitions of, for example, date of knowledge, interrupted proceedings, and special rights of minors. We do not believe them to be fully consistent at this stage with the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality. Let us first hear about the Commission???s inquiry as to what kinds of cross-border problems exist in the domain of limitation periods in cases of personal injury and then move on to the concrete definitions. For example, if the inquiry were to show that there is not such a huge discrepancy between Member States??? rules, the country of origin approach, as the report suggests, might show the way. Personally I would support this approach. |
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