Javier Zarzalejos: "We have a President of the Government who is dedicated to witticisms in the election campaign despite the figures of the pandemic"

The Popular Party MEP Javier Zarzalejos spoke on Capital Radio's Atalayar programme to talk about the important reform of the Euro Order and he broke down the main organisational, logistical and coordination challenges that the government must address in the process of mass vaccination of the population.

You have made some statements after presenting the report on the reform of the European arrest warrant in the European Parliament, saying that the reform of this is necessary to protect the constitutionality of the countries, the law of laws in each of the member countries of the European Union.

This is one of the important contributions made in the report, which the Parliament has adopted with a very large majority. The idea is that we must strengthen the protection of the constitutional integrity of the States and the public order of the democratic States, we must strengthen it in the judicial cooperation procedures between the Member States of the European Union, so that a crime of this nature can lead to practically immediate entry by applying the mechanisms of the European Arrest Warrant. This may have seemed very occasional, very episodic, these crimes of sedition, of rebellion in our case. We have seen not only what happened in our country in 2017 between September and October of that year, but we have also seen very recently what has happened in the United States Congress and I believe that we are now aware that our democratic systems as a whole are experiencing a period of great fragility and therefore it is good that in addition to the legal effects that the framework of a future reform of the European arrest warrant such as the one proposed by Parliament may have, the message that the European institutions are sending is important, a message of commitment to institutional stability and therefore a message of commitment to the democratic architecture of the Member States of the Union in the face of those who wish to act outside the rules of the game.

It must be said that this report, approved by Parliament, includes ten more offences which you propose should be added to the list of more than thirty already included in the European arrest warrant?

The aim is to be able to respond more effectively to the new phenomena of criminality and delinquency. Crime is changing, it is transnational crime that takes various forms, we are not talking about large organised mafias structured according to the principles of family loyalty or with very strict internal codes. We are talking about very versatile criminal organisations that really work in networks and that use in a very important way all the elements offered by new technologies. Today there is more online crime than crime in the physical world. And there is a crime that produces new victims, which means sexual harassment of minors, which means impersonation and identity kidnapping. All these new crimes that are being committed or are being committed in the online world. This is a series of crimes that we have incorporated cybercrime, especially identity theft. In addition, we are also talking about those crimes for which there is greater awareness and which the Commission itself has even proposed that they should be Euro crimes, crimes such as those related to hatred or violence against women, episodes or crimes of massive pollution, cases such as the Prestige in Spain of massive spills that cause very considerable damage, and we are talking about other crimes that we needed to incorporate into this list, crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity. It is a question of updating the repertoire of crimes or criminal categories that should lead to a much faster reaction from the European courts, bearing in mind that, with the exceptions that we already know about, the European arrest warrant is a system that works. The latest data available is from 2018 and we are talking about more than seven thousand surrenders, more than seven thousand suspects or convicted persons have been handed over from one European country to another and it is really an instrument that is fully established in the judicial sphere of the European Union.

Therefore, it is a fine-tuning of a legal figure that, as Javier Zarzalejos has rightly commented, has worked over the last few years, and furthermore, in favour of the report, the vote in Parliament, which has been by a very large majority, speaks in favour of it. Does this need to update the Euro Order not reveal a lack of trust between the member states so that it can function properly?

The first is the existence of a crisis of confidence. This is an important point, not only for the relaunch of the Euro-warrant, but also for all instruments of judicial cooperation, and confidence between states needs to be strengthened. On the other hand, it should be borne in mind that when the Euro warrant was introduced more than sixteen years ago, it was a legal revolution because it meant abandoning traditional extradition procedures. The courts of some countries were suspicious of what the courts of other countries had ruled. That is why they had the need to route and find millimetre equivalence between the criminal codes of one country and another, whereas the surrender procedure that the Euro order establishes is a procedure based on trust. The fact that we are a community based on democratic states and we understand that what a court in France decides has all the guarantees that we in Spain need or demand in order to be able to hand over an alleged offender that the French courts are demanding. When that basis of trust deteriorates, then problems arise. In any case, what I would like to say is that the Court of Justice of the EU has produced a very clear jurisprudence on this point, which establishes the obligations of cooperation between Member States. Equally, these problems are fortunately very localised problems. At the moment we have a problem with the way Belgium understands its cooperation roles, we have a problem with the countries that are at the moment subject to the procedure of article 7 of the rule of law treaty and serious deficiencies in the rule of law in the case of Hungary and Poland. Even so, the cooperation procedure is being maintained and the commission is a commission that is acting. Just last December the European Commission with the Commissioner for Justice opened seven infringement procedures against seven member states for deviations from or misapplication of the framework decision establishing the Euro ordinance into national law. The Commission, at its own pace and with its own strategy, is committed to improving this instrument.

Should there be a specific court, in this case a central court, to avoid regional or local courts centralising the Euro ordinance?

Concretely this is one of the proposals that has been made and has been approved. The idea is to move towards a specialisation of judicial bodies. The Euro-warrant is a procedure that has its technical complexities. In Spain, the granting of Euro-warrants is centralised in the National Court and we are a very decentralised state. Federal countries in Europe are more dispersed, which is why we saw the case of the famous Schleswig-Holstein court or the Brussels court. One of the recommendations, which is also a fairly widespread criterion among many jurists, is precisely that specialised bodies, within the ordinary structure of the courts of a country, should centralise the execution of the Euro-orders that are requested from that country.

I did not want to miss the opportunity to ask you about the news of the week and probably of the year. The vaccination campaign and the mass vaccination process which has run into this difficulty, the absence or shortage of vaccines caused by one of the laboratories. The committee has interpreted that it could be a deception on the part of some of the manufacturers, how is this going to end? Are we going to have enough vaccines available to the citizens in the time that was initially planned?

Clearly not in the timeframe initially envisaged. The point is that we should be talking about very few weeks and there are indications and evidence that the Commission is acting quickly to make up for lost time. Today we have had the good news of an additional delivery of 35 million doses from Pfizer BioNTech. In Europe we are going to have eight vaccines and what is clear is that the production difficulties that Pfizer has had to face, which have now been overcome after resolving the problems at the Belgian plant and the entry into operation of a plant in Germany that already has the appropriate licence, are not only going to unblock, but are going to compensate for the shortfalls that have occurred in the very near future. In the case of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is where the controversy has arisen, at first sight it is a contract that is perfectly reasonable to maintain that it could have been outlined in a stricter way and at the same time it seems that the behaviour of the laboratory is inconsistent with good faith in the fulfilment of contracts.

How have the United States and the United Kingdom, who are way ahead of us in the vaccination campaign, done better? What is the notable difference that has caused this inequality when it comes to immunising citizens?

We opted for a cost-effective process of contracting out the purchase of the vaccine. This is the direction that must be taken in order to favour or guarantee the vaccine to those countries that have less bargaining power in the market. The EU has had a longer and more complex vaccine certification process than the United States or the United Kingdom. The problem of vaccine shortages, which may be a one-off imbalance, should not make us forget the real challenge of the vaccination process, which is the challenge of organisation, logistics and coordination between administrations. The dials, however much we have them, do not inject themselves, and this is only possible through what is currently lacking, and it is largely due to the absence of a government that has sufficient instruments to be able to promote and propose a national vaccination strategy. Of course, this strategy must involve the Autonomous Communities, which are the central actors in health matters, but it must respond to national criteria, from the allocation of vaccines to the distribution process. It is the government that has to mobilise all available resources, both public and private, civilian and military, to tackle our country's absolute priority, which is none other than to complete the mass vaccination process successfully.

In Spain, Mr Zarzalejos, many people are dying, but if we did not have the doses, I could still understand it, but we would have to do more to vaccinate everyone as quickly as possible.

In Spain we are going to have the doses and we have to complete this first vaccination with the second dose for all those groups that have received the first dose and from there a new situation will open up. We are going to have single-dose vaccines, which have other requirements in terms of transport, storage and distribution, and we are going to enter a situation in which those groups that are already very easily identifiable, those in hospitals or those in homes, will have already been vaccinated and we will have to go to other segments of the population according to the established priorities. What happens is that there are strategic decisions in a vaccination process that require the contribution of means such as these that can only be taken by the Government, and furthermore, only the Government should take them because it is the one with the competence. There is no need for new legal instruments. The government has all the legal authorisations in the regulations currently in force, in addition to the state of alarm, to be able to do so. It is a matter of mobilising resources. We have to vaccinate morning, noon and night on working days and public holidays and thus ensure an unprecedented logistical operation. In order to implement this mobilisation, the decisions must be taken by the government, so it is certainly reprehensible that the government is absent in these circumstances. What is more, we have a Prime Minister who is busy making up ideas during the election campaign in Catalonia while the numbers of infected and dead people in our country continue to be absolutely unacceptable.