Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-03-01-Speech-4-031"
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"en.20010301.2.4-031"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, thanks to its own process of consolidation, the European Union has an ever more important role and ever greater influence on the global stage. As part and parcel of this process of globalisation to include the East, the Mediterranean, North America and Africa, closer relations with other regional blocs are being forged. The agreement, which was recently reached with Mexico and to which the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Castañeda, attached considerable importance is a move in this direction. According to Mr Castañeda, this agreement, whereby his country is able to rely upon a positive input from Parliament and the European Union, will act as a kind of stimulus to Mexico to improve the conditions under which people live.
Within Latin America, special importance is attached to the Association Agreement with Mercosur – an agreement modelled on the Treaty of Rome as a response to the process of globalisation and as a means of improving Mercosur’s relations with North America.
This process began in 1995 and was made concrete in the Declaration from the First Summit between the Heads of State and Government of Latin America and the Caribbean and the European Union, held in Río de Janeiro from 25 to 29 June 1999. Since then, meetings with organised civil society have also been taking place. In this connection, it is to be regretted that the European Parliament nonetheless has no part to play in defining the mandate for the negotiation of agreements with third countries. True enough, the agreements give top priority to the commercial sphere and to economic development, but other considerations also have an important role to play: the fight against poverty, the promotion of cooperation and the development and consolidation of democracy and the rule of law and respect for human rights. This agreement was conceived as a transitional legal instrument between the third-generation agreements and the more broadly based interregional agreement which, at the same time, covers the political, economic and trade liberalisation dimensions.
The commitment signified by these agreements with Mercosur and Chile is therefore unique. The directives adopted by the General Affairs Council on 13 September 1999 are effective as from the date of the Summit I have just mentioned. However, we think that a number of changes need to be made. Bearing in mind, too, that the European Parliament represents the will of European society, which is not only a commercial and economic society but also a society full of concern for justice, fairness, solidarity, culture and the social dimension, Parliament hopes to use this report to introduce new directives expressly embodying the following requirements.
Firstly, the legal basis of the new agreement should consist of Article 310 (formerly Article 238) of the EC Treaty, together with the second sentence of the first paragraph of Article 300(2) and the second paragraph of Article 300(3). It is important to provide the agreement with a legal guarantee and to give expression to the fact that the negotiating parties do in actual fact have a whole legal tradition behind them.
Secondly, it is necessary to include practical mechanisms for the provisions of the future that will enable the objectives proposed by the CFSP – international cooperation and the development of democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights – to be based upon the principle of economic and social cohesion and to tend towards reducing imbalances.
Thirdly, the new directives need to be based both upon international conventions – I am thinking of those concerning ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples, as important in Mercosur as in other countries – and upon agreements connected with the International Labour Organisation. In that way, monitoring mechanisms might be established, designed to improve the specific ways in which unions operate and workers are organised and providing not only for joint participation in the UN and other international bodies – something which would lend more importance to this agreement – but also for the existence of explicit mechanisms for dialogue in matters relating to the common European security and defence policy, as recommended recently by the Institute for European-Latin American Relations.
It is also necessary to increase and improve the specific participation of civil society, as well as to examine the conditionality whereby it is assumed that this Agreement has to be subordinate to the World Trade Organisation despite the fact that both the European Union and Mercosur have enough of a solid reputation to reach practical agreements.
It is also necessary to improve relations with other countries and, as far as is applicable, to eliminate the current division of the process into two phases. In order to achieve this, Parliament must be able to approve this report, which has been adopted unanimously by the Committee on Foreign Affairs following considerable help from the Commission’s Secretariat General."@en1
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