Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-09-05-Speech-2-084"
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"en.20000905.7.2-084"2
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"Mr President, I welcome the resolve that was shown here today by the French Presidency and the Commission in placing emphasis on enlargement as the key priority for the external action of the Union. I hope that when we come to deal with the matter in the House tomorrow the Verheugen incident will have simply served as a timely reminder that we must get our signals clear and avoid giving mixed messages with regard to this strategic priority.
With regard to the matter in hand, I should like to pick up on a point made by the Commissioner earlier today when he talked about the attempt to make foreign policy more effective and to warmly welcome and subscribe to his view on the indivisibility of the Union's foreign policy. If we take the Barcelona process, the Middle East peace process, our relations with the Western Balkans, our relations with Russia, clearly there is a vast area of policy to be covered and a wide variety of instruments. It is clear that a successful foreign policy cannot stand on one pillar alone. Even if the conduct of foreign policy – and in particular, the security and defence dimension of foreign policy – is essentially for government, it follows that because of the nature of the policy terrain and the instruments available it cannot be government's exclusive concern. The Commission is right to demand its right of association under the Treaty and, through that, for this Parliament to demand its right of accountability and scrutiny.
A second general point I should like to refer to is in respect of the efficiency of policy. Here too the new Commission – and in particular, Commissioner Patten – deserve to be congratulated, first of all for revealing to us the extent of the horror that much of the policy had become. Let me recall one of the results of these inquiries: in the past five years the average delay in the disbursement of committed funds has increased from three years to four-and-a-half years. For certain programmes the backlog of outstanding commitments is equivalent to more than eight-and-a-half years of payments. That clearly is a farce in anyone's analysis. It has to be said in fairness that the former Commission led by Jacques Santer was as much a victim as an author of this process. This is an accumulation of an ineffective and inefficient system over years. We welcome the commitment to an urgent review of that process.
On behalf of the Liberal Democrat Group I should like to lay particular emphasis on our distress at the code of secrecy rather than the code of transparency normally promoted by the Council. Blanket secrecy is not the way to legitimise an evolving Community policy. My group deplores the fact that this code of secrecy was slipped in during the Parliamentary summer recess, with no Parliamentary consultation and by written procedure. It amounts to a form of intergovernmental conspiracy against citizens' right to know. I want to hear from the Council today what role it feels it is prepared to accord to this House in terms of the scrutiny and accountability of issues which may be intergovernmental but which cannot stand on one pillar alone?"@en1
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