Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-10-25-Speech-1-043"
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"en.19991025.3.1-043"2
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"Madam President, my group is totally supportive of the interinstitutional agreement of 25 May 1999 on the internal investigations which the anti-fraud office must be able to carry out within the institutions, bodies or agencies of the Communities, including the European Parliament. This seems to us an excellent agreement. It is indeed necessary to react vigorously to any suspicion of fraud of any nature whatsoever.
We are, however, rather more puzzled when faced with the measure to be applied with regard to the European Parliament which has been proposed to us today, in the form of an amendment to Parliament’s Rules of Procedure, directed at both officials and Members of Parliament. I feel that we have simultaneously moved too fast in one respect and not fast enough in another. Not fast enough because, as regards the officials, it seems unnecessary to me to wait until the end of October before taking an implementing decision applying to parliamentary officials. A simple Bureau decision taken under Rule 22(5) of the Rules of Procedure would have been sufficient.
But perhaps we have moved too fast regarding the Members of Parliament, and here I plead guilty before Mr Napolitano, chairman of the Committee on Constitutional Affairs, as I am a member of this committee. But perhaps the debate in plenary session will enable us to make good some omissions. We should at least have found it strange, considering that this does not exist in many parliamentary democracies, that Members of the elected House may be monitored by a body which is more or less answerable to the Executive and, as it happens, although OLAF is supervised by an independent supervisory committee, it is still run by a manager appointed by the Commission.
This observation should bring us back to the interpretation of Recital 4 and Article 1 of the interinstitutional agreement defining the persons whose breaches of discipline may be subject to administrative inquiries by OLAF. The persons targeted are the personnel subject to the Staff Regulations and Conditions of employment of other servants as well as, I quote, ‘Members, heads or members of staff of the institutions, bodies and agencies of the Communities not subject to the Staff Regulations’. I think that this wording and the reference to the Staff Regulations in particular show that the members and personnel involved here are employees rather than elected representatives. In any case the Members of the European Parliament are subject to specific rules under the Treaty itself.
Consequently, Madam President, I think that Members of Parliament must, of course, be subject to a rigorous internal inspection system, and I am the first to say so, but I do not believe that the text establishing this control should be one that is simply derived from the standard decision applicable to just any individual within the administrative bodies of the Community. The Members of Parliament must be covered by a specific decision which could perhaps envisage a separate supervisory board, for parliamentary inquiries, for example, which would be elected by this House at the beginning of each legislative term. This text could quite naturally be included in an Annex to our Rules of Procedure, whilst it would not be necessary for the text on officials to be included.
If, however, my fellow Members considered it politically impossible to postpone the adoption of the current draft legislation, and I am not that far from their point of view, I think that a reform should still be started fairly quickly."@en1
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