Strasbourg, 15/06/2001 (Agence Europe) - The European Parliament enhanced the measures aimed at ensuring the confidentiality of information exchanged between the Member States after incidents in civil aviation, by adopting the report from Gerard Collin on "accounts given of events in civil aviation". In order to improve air safety, the EU provided itself in 1994 with a Directive, which makes it obligatory to gathered and release information drawn from investigations into aerial accidents. Last December, the Commission proposed a new text that widens the scope to all "aerial events" (faults, malfunction etc.) and specifies the confidentiality rules. The EP amendments specify that the receiver of the information on accidents undertakes not to pass on the information to third parties (251 votes for, 175 against and 13 abstentions). On the other hand, the EP specifies that the Member States may initiate court proceedings when there has been a failing in duty comparable to serious negligence, thus modifying the original text by the Commission, which foresaw that the Member States abstain from initiating legal action with regards to infringements (…) which the come to their attention only because they have been signalled in the framework of the national system for the rendering of obligatory accounts on events. The rapporteur recalls that around fifty aerial accidents occur each year in the world. Europe represents one third of the air traffic, but only 10% of the accidents, it underlines in its explanatory memorandum.