"guardacostas" in English

Moreover, the Council has guaranteed the parallel adoption of both legislative proposals.

In Denmark, polluters are monitored and traced by aircraft made available by the military.

Illegal discharges into international waters must be punished by an international environmental court.

However, I suspect that there remains an insufficient appreciation of the real impact of these provisions.

The Council accepted a framework decision in December in which the penalties are incorporated in the third pillar.

The Commission was able to explain its views on the subject in the course of replies to questions in the House. We are favourably inclined towards the ideas.

Mr Commissioner, will the Commission be putting forward a proposal on the coast guard in this parliamentary term or not?

He also considers the obligations on operators to provide their customers with information to be excessive.

In 1999 alone, in the area of the Mediterranean – and the Mediterranean is a closed sea – 1 638 cases of illegal dumping were reported.

Because of the very nature of the maritime sector, international conventions have proved to be good and effective tools.

coastguard station

In addition, there is often a long procedure before judgment is passed on them and heavy penalties are imposed – which is not always the case – to deter them from reoffending.

For this reason, we need very rapidly in the medium term a European coast guard service, not least in view of the new and emerging risk of terrorism.

Up to now, I have not been given a direct and concrete answer as to whether this directive will affect ships that are not registered in countries within the European Union.

It could also play a number of additional roles in EU waters, such as providing an adequate emergency response mechanism should an environmental disaster, such as the, occur again.

We cannot sit and wait until terrorists attack vessels in European waters, but rather we must counter them in good time through a coast guard service.

Our target is the rarest of cases, those which are intolerable and unacceptable; we want to make all operators upstream in the long maritime transport chain aware of their responsibilities.

For both this coast guard and the already established European Maritime Agency (EMSA), it is important to have sufficient powers to enhance safety at sea.

A common European coast guard is desirable in order to trace discharges more effectively and for the authorities to act more quickly and more adequately.

This sort of penal approach discourages young people from going to sea, especially those with technical know-how and a good education, and they are precisely the people that European shipping needs.