Strasbourg, 05/10/2000 (Agence Europe) - The European Commission was once more brought (see article on page 11 on Evans report), to tell the Parliament that, from now on, it would refuse to take part in certain activities if it does not have the necessary human resources. It did not through the voice of Commission Erkki Liikanen, in his answer to the oral question from two Swedish MEPs - Mrs Theorin and Mrs Sacredeus - who wanted to know if it wanted to continue financing the ECPAT association project which, in Sweden, implements the draft Code of conduct against sexual tourism involving children.
Mr Liikanen explained that the Commission would continue its action against violence towards children, including sexual tourism, in the framework of the cooperation in terms of Justice and Home Affairs, but it is not considering any new allocations for the awareness raising campaigns in this fields, in the present context of "shortage of resources". Mr Liikanen recalled that the Commission lacks more than 1,200 posts to assume all its responsibilities, and that it thus decided to reduce the importance of these "executive" tasks and concentrate its human resources on its "political and legislative" tasks. Mr Liikanen, announced that the Commission is: a) preparing for the end of the year a proposal in view of renewing the STOP programme, which will also cover sexual tourism of which children are the victims; b) prepare legislative proposals, in accordance with the conclusions of the Tampere Summit.