Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-06-14-Speech-3-039"
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"en.20000614.3.3-039"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I shall answer this series of questions, which all, or more or less all, seek to question or probe the European Commission.
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr President, having said all of this, I should like to confirm, in order to provide a specific answer to your question, that the Commission is ready to take action. It will face up to its responsibilities and will therefore come up with an initiative. We shall do so immediately by taking the opportunity provided by the next trialogue to undertake a study and to find the best way to effectively bring the three institutions together on this issue. We shall do so in light of the discussion which will take place in July, by working on and using the optimum legal combination of articles 308 and 191.
At the instigation of the chairmen of your Parliament’s main political groups, Mr Poettering, Mr Barón Crespo, Mr Cox, Mrs Hautala and Mr Lannoye, you asked the Commission to state its position on a very important and topical issue: the status of political parties in Europe. We therefore decided to look into this issue and I am now able to inform you of the European Commission’s position, as it considered the matter yesterday at its weekly meeting.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are aware of the many studies that Parliament has undertaken on this issue over the last ten years, as many of you have mentioned, such as the reports by Professor Tsatsos and Mr Ferber and, more recently, on 13 April, the report by your fellow Members, Mr Dimitrakopoulos and Mr Leinen. We are aware of Parliament’s concern and we are familiar with your proposals. We share your desire for changes to consolidate European democracy and the extremely important process of European integration.
Mr Poettering reminded us of the Treaty’s current wording. I would like to talk about the former Article 138 A, which has now become Article 191, and which states that “political parties at European level are important as a factor for integration within the Union. They contribute to forming a European awareness and to expressing the political will of the citizens of the Union”. This text, Mrs Hautala, which, it is true, is merely declaratory, but which does have the virtue of existing, demonstrates that European political parties will under no circumstances come to replace national parties. This must be stated and restated. This is no more likely to happen than European citizenship, which is also provided for in the texts, ever replacing national citizenship. The one will complement the other, and that is the issue before us here today.
Nevertheless, as I have just said, as important as this text is, it is merely declaratory. It does not include any operational measures, which are clearly lacking and clearly necessary, particularly in order to answer, as Mr Barón Crespo mentioned, the requests and questions addressed to the Court of Auditors.
I shall therefore answer you by stating the European Commission’s intentions, whilst stressing the twofold concern, the twofold demand that we must address, or rather that we must all address together. Firstly, the requirement for speed: things have perhaps dragged on for too long over a period of ten years, without any solution being found. This speed must, however, be accompanied by another requirement, which is legal safety and stability. In the face of this twofold requirement, there are two options that must be considered. The first, which was recommended in the Ferber report, would be to draw up a legislative proposal on the basis of the current Treaty. In this framework, Article 308 could be an operational measure, at least in a provisional phase, linking it to Article 191, in content. But, and I am not saying ‘but’ in a restrictive way, it is simply an expression of the concern for legal security that I mentioned, you know as well as we do that the use of Article 308 is cause for quite widespread reservation and that, in any event, it requires unanimous agreement following consultation of the European Parliament. It is our opinion that the status of European political parties needs to have an unassailable legal basis.
The second option is recommended in the Dimitrakopoulos-Leinen report and is also favoured by the President of the Commission, Mrs Schreyer, and the leaders of the five main European parties, as they stated in a letter that we received yesterday and I myself favour it. This would be, within the framework of the Intergovernmental Conference, to provide an amendment to Article 191 that would probably provide greater legal security."@en1
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