Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-09-15-Speech-3-064"

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"en.19990915.7.3-064"2
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"Madam President, there is no doubt, I consider it desirable – quite the opposite of many of the previous speakers – that the European Union should now be starting to turn its attention to its own Charter of Fundamental Rights. With a common general system of values it can create for itself the thing that people first look at when they meet, a face. It is therefore more than disappointing that this new face for Europe should have no binding nature for, at the present stage of development, the Charter will not form part of the Treaties. The modest will say, “well, at least we are creating a model”. However, we in the European Parliament should not be modest and we should maintain that a Charter opens up the opportunity of forming part of the Treaties, of becoming part of an all-European constitution and even possibly becoming the forerunner to it. In any case, the question of who is to formulate the Charter is of outstanding significance. We well know that institutions have their own intricacy and each their own political motivation. There is then an obvious difference, whether an executive body or the administration work on the fundamental rights, or whether a Parliament does this. Our Committee on Constitutional Affairs demands, therefore, that the European Parliament should not collaborate as a mere accessory in such an important process, but as a generator of ideas and decision-maker on the same level as the Council. It is an important sign that this is precisely how so many national governments have come to see it recently. At the same time, we are aware of the gap in credibility we have with the citizens of Europe which we still have to eliminate, for there would be the opportunity of also consulting, in a quite original form, non-governmental organisations and individual citizens in the process of development of the Charter. From this, we could envisage organising public hearings together, even in non-conventional meetings with citizens from the various national states. In this way, work on the face of fundamental rights could give new strength to the whole body of Europe. Freedom and equality, human dignity and social justice cannot be achieved until they are perceived as an issue of the peoples. I am therefore of the opinion that if we cannot have a Charter with the full participation of Parliament we should rather have none at all."@en1

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