 But when one thinks about justice, one thinks foremost about the rights of the individuals. I will explain to you during my speech that it is much more than that, but let me start with the rights of the individuals and let me start with the situation which I found as the first Justice Commissioner in the history of the European Union actually, a Justice Commissioner who two years ago arrived and there was no directorate general. I had to build it up from scratch. There are many women here. I took the best available on the market. I have 60 percent women in middle management and 80 percent women in top management, taking the best. But I'm not going to speak about women on board today, although it is also a question of justice, but most of all a question of economy, but about the rights of the citizens. Now in all our member states we have created justice systems some over decades, some over hundreds and hundreds of years. They are part of us. They have grown and they are self-sufficient, most of them. But what if you cross the borders? What are the rights of the individual? How the justice is following them? And that is exactly the responsibility which I got under the New Lisbon Treaty. So not to mingle into your justice system in this country or in Luxembourg or in Germany or in Spain, but to build bridges between the justice systems so that justice is not forgotten the moment on a citizen crosses a border. I started with criminal justice because one of the most sensitive moments is when a citizen, let's say you travel in Spain and you are taken by justice because you are supposed to have done something wrong. Well you won't understand what they will tell you and what you are accused of. You are completely lost because you don't speak Spanish, you don't know the Spanish system, but you are a European citizen who has rights not only as an Irish but also as a European citizen. So we had to create minimum rights for the accused people in a justice system of any of the member states so that you go wherever you want and if something happens to you then you have the rights to interpretation, to translation of the main documents, to information what is happening to you, the right to the presence of a lawyer and so on and so forth. The first decision, the first directive on this has been done in nine months that is European record. Never ever has been a directive done so quickly. Why has it been done so quickly? Simply because people sensed that we had to move. There was no rights and we had to fill those rights with the basic rights for the European citizens and while I was working on those who have misbehaved or supposedly misbehaved the accused I saw that those against whom they had misbehaved the victims were nowhere, neither in our national systems very often nor in cross-border systems and then I got a very interesting experience. There was a British lady who came to see me, Maggie Hughes. Maggie's mother of a grown-up son, her son went to a holiday on Mediterranean island in a, well he went out to a disco take and after the disco take there was a big fight. Now the son ended in hospital and Maggie went to the South. She didn't know the language. She didn't know with whom to speak. She had no idea what has happened to his to her son. She had no idea what she could do with the doctors, with the justice, with the police and so on and so forth. Now Maggie came to me, not say commissioner can you do something for my son. She said commissioner can you do something that never a mother will be in my position anymore. That was for me a wake-up call. I told this story to the European parliament and to the council of minister. I presented a package for the victims in Europe and the first directive on this package, the standing of the victims in a criminal procedure has been put into, has been decided at European level. Again in a very very short time you see the feeling that we have to do something for people that a future Maggie does not feel abundant completely but that there is a recognition of not only the victim but also the family of the victim that they need special care. So that's for now this criminal proceedings but I saw in the same time also that while something wonderful is happening Irish man marries a Polish woman and they go to live in Luxembourg, great, great until the moment they want to divorce and our divorce is never something funny but when it is comes to an international divorce then it becomes really very complicated and very painful. So there again I made an European rules on which court and which law applies in such an international divorce and when I had already started that I tackled also successions because people happen to die in a country which is not their country and then the law of that country applies on successions and nobody knows. So all this we have to take in hand in order to make the life of the citizen a normal life wherever they go in Europe they have to feel at home and they have to know that they have basic rights. I could speak two hours more about everything we're doing for the rights of the citizens but then I wouldn't come to the second element of my introduction namely justice can of course be used for the rights of the individuals but it can also be used for the economy and most of all in a situation I do not need to explain you what's going on in this country and in other countries we have to do everything that our justice systems help the economy help the companies develop the internal market eliminate the barriers in the internal market because the internal market with the 500 million potential consumers is a real wealth at our fingertips we got it there and we don't usually delete why because we have not eliminated the barriers so it's becoming very difficult mostly for as a means to go cross border so I have made a special chapter justice for growth and this morning I was speaking with your t-shirt and during the irish presidency justice for growth will be one of the highlights of the irish presidency so what are we doing in that context easy things like for instance reforming the so-called brussels one regulation the brussels one foresees that a judgment in one country in commercial cases is automatically recognized in the second country when there is a cross border dispute now this automatically is not so automatic because today you have a very costly executor procedure where courts have to come in and lawyers make a lot of money and in the end we lose a lot of time a lot of expenses and there is full of red tape so in 95 percent of the cases is executor is an automatic thing there's no problem so why to make problems in 95 percent of the cases when there are only problems in five percent of the cases concentrate on the five percent eliminate the executor and leave the 95 quiet so that is justice for growth so that companies feel comfortable to go cross-border to commit themselves cross-border 47 million euros per year are going to be saved for mainly as a means and then the european common sales law now all member states have a very concrete sales law this sales law is always chosen or not chosen by the contractors contract law is free to be chosen you can make a contract here in this country and shows and choose the contract law of luxembourg i don't know why you should do that but at any late you could so it's a contractual freedom that is fine when you have business to business contracts but what about consumers what about small as a means who like to sell goods cross border now small as a means who like to sell goods cross border have at each time to apply the consumer rights laws of the country they sell to imagine how expensive how costly this is result the as a means don't sell or they choose very few territories in which to sell results also for the e-commerce cross border doesn't really fly although in this country you are very much used to e-commerce european average of cross border online buying is only eight percent of the citizens who do that why it doesn't fly because nobody has the security that if something goes wrong it will be cared well now what are you normally doing when you are opening the internal market you go to a full harmonization that is the normal way european law is done but there again i was thinking wait a moment is there a problem with the irish contract law or with a luxembourgish one so no there's no problem where is the problem then the problem is if a small company likes to sell outside and if a consumer likes to buy outside now then let's solve this problem without creating upheaval to a well established irish contract law and i made and it's for the first time that this proposal has been done to leave all the national laws in place but to present an optional second regime which can be used for cross border buying and selling only under this regime to choose of course because it can be chosen now 67 percent of the companies of small companies in ireland have said that if such a regime would exist they would expand their business so you see you have sometimes to innovate if you see that the normal way of doing law does not function anymore and another element which is of utmost importance you are just discussing now on insolvency in this country you are reforming your insolvency law well i have been looking at the european insolvency law and i came to the conclusion that this law is not going to the right direction because if there is a problem it pushes the industry into dismantling maybe there is a possibility to maintain this industry this company not to dismantle it and to give it a second chance and to maintain jobs by this way too so let's try that and another thing which is missing we have roughly 200 220 000 companies which go bust every year every year and one fourth of this are cross have a cross border they are not only in one member state but these solutions are not on the table so we have to find a solution for this cross border insolvencies in order to handle that well so you see i'm putting on the table solutions which have to be discussed like everything which i put on the table by the parliament and by the council in order to make new european law in order to save jobs and not to dismantle jobs and then something which is going to be very high on the agenda during your presidency and this is the new rules on data protection we do have rules on protection of personal data in europe since 1995 now ladies and gentlemen 1995 that was in pray internet times one percent of the population was on the internet and the creator of facebook was eight years old the world has changed greatly since that we're all older too and we are still not older come on by the way i was sitting with her sister mary in european parliament and i was a gorgeous time i love mary we discovered a very close link yeah so data protection is a rule in europe since a long time and it is very strongly linked to the way european citizens view themselves comes out of history european citizens do not trust companies and they do not trust governments authorities out of history you can understand and that is also the reason why as well in the treaties as well in the charter of fundamental rights the protection of personal data is inscribed because it is this necessity for the values the the profound values of the european citizens so if that is so well then we have to adapt our rules that they can function in a modern world and with this um a piece of legislation i can very well explain also how personal rights and business interests can go hand in hand what is the situation today the european legislation of 1995 that was a directive led to 27 different national laws which are interpreted in a complete different way result patchwork fragmentation of the market and most of all our smaller european companies complain because every time they want to reach another market they have to adapt to a new law and the laws are sometimes conflicting and so on and so forth this adapting to other laws cost our business 2.3 billion euros a year 2.3 billion they haven't done anything they just pay that for adapting to the different laws so what i do i scrap the whole thing in future one continent one rule one data protection authority for everybody who wants to come to our territory has to apply this rule so i utilize the form of a regulation a regulation that is a purely harmonizing method i do just the contrary what i have done with contract law you see this time i do a regulation scrapping national laws replacing them by one european law in order to bring an order to this and in order to allow our businesses to develop but on the same time the rules on the protecting of the personal data on the of the individual have to be clarified and have to be made operable and citizens have to know that they have these rights and that they can demand that these rights are implemented now who is going to implement these rights if i look now around they will say brussels well no you know why because i think that the regulators who are operating on a territory know their people and know their businesses very well so not everything needs to be done by brussels brussels needs to do the general rule under which everybody operates but then leave the people to operate so the irish data protection authority will be responsible for companies who have their main establishment in ireland but it will do that on basis of a single european law in contact with other national regulators who apply the same law and who might have a subsidiary in their country or who might have a citizen who has complained in their country so the network of the national regulators to function very well but the responsibility to be with the national regulator on the territory of who the company has its main establishment so with one piece of law you achieve two things opening the market for companies putting legal certainty also for companies and 2.3 billion euros less costs and on the same time allowing the citizens to get their rights now i have not yet spoken in this whole context about the security aspects because there are also the law enforcement questions and the questions of how the police forces operate in order to secure in in in order to guarantee the security of a society now maybe there you need without eliminating the rights of the individual because the treaty does not foresee differences the treaty has one horizontal rule for the rights but one right is never absolute when a right touches another right then you have to equilibrate and here you have the right of the individual to the protection of his personal data and you have the right of the society to be protected against crime so you have to put both in equilibrium and that is why i chose for this part of solving problems the form of a directive which allows then the member states to adopt these common rules to the specific needs of their territory i can imagine that the police forces in this country have a different problem to solve than the police forces in luxembourg and we should give then this to the governments under the control of the european court the possibility to maneuver so that the guarantee of security is is solid another element i very quickly come to this because it is an interesting one because it's the first time that at the european level we have harmonized the definition of a crime ladies and gentlemen i am very cautious when it comes to criminal law criminal law is very much integrated into the cultural diversity of a member state so you have to be very cautious and by the way the treaty does not allow the commission to come into the criminal law at any level but the treaty asks from the european union to protect the financial interests of the european union the crime against the budget so the taxpayers money which are in the european budget and which is also misused by some criminals now very often those criminals operate in different member states and it happens so that in some member states the crime against the budget is no crime so they settle there and they are very happy thereafter now that cannot be and that is why i put on the table a definition of what is a crime against the european budget and also the minimal sanctions which have to be established in national law and then comes the second problem madam because you are the public prosecutor aren't you so you are responsible for this territory but your responsibility does not go cross-border if you want to be active cross-border you have to agree to do that together with the public prosecutor in a neighboring state maybe this public prosecutor is not very interested to pursue that because he doesn't see the real interest in the european budget so in the end not much is happening very much to the advantage to the criminals and that is why i started the reflections on and what is possible with the treaty of lisbon to slowly slowly set up a european public prosecutor for this special action not for a crime which is happening under madam's responsibility in this country but i mean not the crime the the the solving the problem but only for the questions of crime against the european budget so that a european prosecutor in the end can make the national prosecutors work together so that there is no hiding place anymore for the criminals i'm sure you are very much shocked about everything which is going on and these things are going on now since two years only they completely change the way justice is done in our member states because there are the bridges and there is a collaboration and there is although the independence of the national justice and i'm fighting for this you might know the fights i have had on hungary and on rumania when these independence of the national justice was put in question no way so justice has to be independent but justice applies the laws which the politicians are doing colleagues all right so we are doing together with our parliaments me together with the european parliament those laws once they are in place it is on the independent justice to do its job so i am trying to do my job i'm very happy that i'm not alone to do it i have a very strong parliament and a very strong council of justice ministers to help me and that will change the face of this europe it will be in the end a europe of the rights of the individual where everybody can feel at ease and at home thank you very much