Text tabled : A6-0409/2005

  Bart Staes (Verts/ALE), in writing. (NL) Anyone who has closely followed the debate on the Services Directive will be surprised to find that the compromise between conservatives and social democrats has been interpreted in different ways. A group to the Right defends the compromise because it ‘does not affect the country of origin principle’, while the Left considers it to be a ‘definite departure from that self-same country of origin principle’.

We therefore have two views on opposite ends of the spectrum. What is more, this compromise does not make it clear to what extent Member States can impose hard and fast criteria on the provision of certain services on their territory so as to avoid social dumping.

Moreover, the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats and the Socialist Group in the European Parliament have scrapped the reference to social policy and consumer protection.

Whilst Parliament has managed to remove a whole range of services from the scope of the directive, it still applies to a large extent to services of general economic interest.

Since the rehashed Bolkestein Directive contains, in any case, many legal ambiguities, it will once again result in many lawsuits for the European Court of Justice. In no way does the revised document offer the transparency and legal certainty that are needed.

We Greens saw it as crucial that services of general economic interest be excluded from the final document and the country of origin principle deleted from it. Since our requests have not been accommodated, I have ultimately voted against.