Mr President, I would like to start by thanking all the shadow rapporteurs and the draftsman of the opinion of the Committee on Foreign Affairs for their interest and their commitment with regard to this report. I am sure that we would all have liked more committee time, not least to have debated the amendments presented in committee and the overall content more thoroughly, as I am aware that certain difficulties still remain. But there is a great deal on which the majority of us from the committee agree and I trust the Council and the Commission will remember that.

We welcome the Commission's two communications as an important step in the development of a common asylum policy. We support the stress on measures such as the resettlement programmes, protected entry procedures and support in the region as being additional and complementary to the existing rights to seek asylum within the European Union, and agree that those internal asylum systems should be of high quality.

We agree that we do not view the outsourcing of internal EU responsibilities to camps in countries such as Libya as offering any sustainable solution, or even a short-term solution, to those seeking asylum. As regards the single procedure, we recognise that it is better both for the asylum applicant and the authorities if all relevant information is examined at one time, and we welcome the fact that the Commission has laid out a common order of decision-making. However, we also recognise the possible protection gap in those Member States that only employ full refugee status and have no practice of subsidiary protection, compared with Member States using both categories.

I recognise that this is a difficult issue for some Members and that paragraphs 37 and 38 of the report may seem to pre-empt the reconsultation process on the procedures directive in which we hope Parliament will be involved very shortly. I would welcome the views of Members on the possible loss of those paragraphs. Parliament, however, fully agrees with the need to frontload the decision-making process. We support the need for the better use of in-country information by better-trained staff. It is appalling that someone's life should depend on an opinion that was never tested for its veracity. This is the situation facing Ramzi Isalam, a homosexual Algerian man who may be deported from the UK to Algeria as he is deemed not to be in need of subsidiary protection. This is due to a line in a Canadian diplomat's report some years ago, which is still included in the country information the UK uses. All the other opinions of that diplomat have been deleted over time. The EU has to do better than that in terms of the quality of the information we use to decide on people's lives.

More controversially, the majority view in committee was that we need to have in place some form of monitoring or report-back system on what happens to those who are returned having made unsuccessful claims for protection. Then we might know if it is really safe to return others.

The committee fully supports the need for a better coordinated approach to support in the region for the vast majority of the world's refugees who never even try to come to the European Union, contrary to many newspaper reports and some politicians' views. We recognise that such coordination is a challenge, but a piecemeal approach creates confusion. We want to know how the Commission proposes to improve such coordination in future. We also agree that we need new money, not a reallocation of existing aid budgets, to offer any long-term support to help improve capacity and the quality of response in the regions of origin in full cooperation with the countries concerned.

What else do we agree on? We agree that resettlement programmes can be of great value, especially when they cater for those most at risk in an already precarious situation; that these programmes can be used within the European Union to help develop a public understanding as to why refugees seek protection; and that this understanding can help to combat all forms of discrimination, not least racism and xenophobia.

We also agree that we need a common foreign and security policy that commits the EU as a matter of priority to conflict prevention and the resolution of long-term conflicts. In that context we welcome the proposed EU regional protection programmes and wish to be involved in their development and assessment.

As you can see, there is much that we agree on and that is not in dispute in this debate. Whatever the final vote tomorrow, that is the message I would wish us to convey to both the Council and the Commission. We agree that the Commission's dual approach – to aim for a universally high standard of application of the current directives within the EU and to improve the conditions for the vast majority of refugees within the region they are fleeing – is a reasonable and indeed ambitious programme. Parliament will wish to be fully involved in the development of such initiatives.

Jean Lambert