Gerry's Blog

Kate and I had a flying visit to Strasbourg yesterday to the European Parliament. The visit was organised by one of the written declaration sponsors, Edward McMillan-Scott who is a Vice-President of the parliament.

It was hectic schedule but well worth effort. We met with the other sponsors, many MEP’s who have signed the declaration and many who did not realise that there was a declaration on the introduction of an EU wide Amber alert. As we stated when we launched the declaration in Brussels last month- the alert is not our idea. It already has the support of the European commission and they and other groups such as Missing Children Europe, PACT and Missing People have done a huge amount of work previously. Our hope is that getting the declaration formally adopted by the parliament will speed up the implementation of alerts throughout the EU member staets and facilitate cross-border cooperation. Many of the MEP’s who have not signed said they will and a lot of those who have already signed said they will lobby their National and fellow group MEP’s to sign.

Today we heard that 283 have now signed the declaration compared to 211 on Monday. We are hopeful that the additional 110 signatures required will be achieved by the next sitting of parliament on the 7-10th July. It would be a great shame if the declaration failed because of a combination of ignorance and apathy.