Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-05-30-Speech-3-152"
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"en.20010530.8.3-152"2
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"Mr President, we regret the little time available to us because this project has not been able to lead to a democratic and open debate, as we would have liked, and this would have contributed to making the population and civil society more aware of what we are dealing with in Parliament.
We as a group have always supported the Commission because we have believed that this was a great project. It has been criticised for being too light, but I believe that not everybody has understood that the Commission’s proposal consisted of transferring specific policies into thematic strategies; and this is because the thematic strategies are a new way of working, a more scientific way, where the details are going to be studied in greater depth: the technical levels and the technical solutions, the viability of projects, the situations of the countries and the type of legislation which would be suitable.
We have therefore largely supported the project in the form in which it was drawn up by the Commission. We believed that our margin for presenting amendments had to be limited and narrow, in order not to completely change the system of the project. We wanted this balanced academic nature of the Commission’s project to be respected. Furthermore, we firmly believe that one of the best policies in the history of Europe is the environmental policy: it has fantastic teams of officials and, at the same time, teams of experts to advise them, and it seemed to us that it was not a question of creating another parallel project.
Now that the situation has taken a new turn towards numerous amendments, we have introduced some priorities to supplement the project, not to correct it, because there are already many approved directives and it seemed to us that it was not a question of looking backwards. We have therefore introduced initiatives, for example, on the urban environment, on the countryside, on a sustainable culture, on the issue of animal feed and the control of the food chain, an issue which we would have put much more stress on if the document had been produced before now. Therefore, we have wanted to strengthen and extend it, thereby showing that our group has a great interest in this policy.
However, I must say that certain amendments have been introduced which, if approved, will oblige us to reject the general project. Because we cannot allow a project of this type to talk about, for example, the indiscriminate civil liability of all persons who have companies or initiatives. For example, Amendment No 68, if applied directly, would oblige any mountain farmer with cattle which causes problems for the environment, to take out civil liability insurance. This is absurd. Some of the amendments are excessively tough and are going to have repercussions for the citizens. The same must be said of an indiscriminate rate on hydrocarbons and on energy which may penalise the weaker sections of the population who take two hours to get to work because they live in the outskirts of the cities.
To sum up, we have believed in the project and we are supporting it. We support the Commission. We support the idea as a whole and most of the ideas within it. We do not, however, believe this is a Christmas tree, as one Member says, which any old thing can be hung on. Neither is it a project for Gothenburg. It is a project for Johannesburg, which we want to present proudly in 2002, supporting the Commission and European policy."@en1
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