Wolfgang Kreissl-Dörfler (PSE). – (DE) Madam President, I am going to set my notes aside. I had prepared a lot of other things to say, but I must point out that we have certainly not achieved all we can here. I, too, hoped for more or better regulations. I am in two minds: one that wants to have the best and one that, here at European level, must make a decision, including about minimum standards that should apply in countries that have no standards at all. Each of us should look at how things are in our own country, at what is happening there, what standards our country has. Are they really all that great?

As the European Parliament, we can set only minimum standards. The fact that the Council has managed to come to any agreement at all borders on a miracle, because four or five states, including my own Federal Minister of the Interior, did not want to have any regulation at all and said they were happy with the way things were in their countries. Now the challenge is for the national parliaments and the national governments to do considerably better. Nobody is stopping them finding better solutions – where is that written? When I was a student, I learned that ‘looking in the statute books makes it easier to find the law.’ Mr Deprez is right: if you read all the articles together, then what we can achieve here becomes clearer. It is not as if we are going to find the philosopher’s stone. Nobody has ever found that – quite the contrary. However, I want to see this compromise used as the basis, so that in future, the European Union can do it better. My colleagues in the Bundestag, the lower house of the German Parliament, and in each of the German federal states will have to play their part, as our country has an 18-month period of detention pending removal. We have a re-entry ban that is much longer, and in many federal states there have been decisions that are not acceptable. To say that it is a shameful thing – then all I can do is advise that this is not the way ahead. Just to oppose it all the time – heavens above, that has never provided any help at all to the people who have to work in this area and those who are stuck in the countries that do not have any guidelines.