Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-10-24-Speech-3-105"
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"en.20011024.5.3-105"2
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"I would like to reiterate that the Commission has been given the exclusive competence to hand down a judgment to protect the common interest at this stage of the codecision procedure.
You are also quite right, Mr Poos, when you point out in the report that the crux of the debate is, essentially, how the General Affairs Council functions. It is extremely difficult, in just one monthly meeting, to take decisions on all the issues relating to EU external policy, including those on security policy, on maintaining the single institutional framework of the European Union and all the horizontal and institutional issues, such as, for example, the recent regulation on access to documents or the coordination of the EU response to the tragic events of 11 September, as well as coordinating sectoral policies. The Commission is fairly well placed to judge the degree of variation in the subjects dealt with by the General Affairs Council, as there are times when we require several Commissioners to represent us at the same session. We therefore support your view, Mr Poos: the various formations in the Council need a central body responsible for coordination and, at the moment, it is very difficult for the General Affairs Council to do this. We must therefore avoid a situation where the General Affairs Council becomes some sort of Foreign Affairs Council, because there is no other formation in charge of coordination. Furthermore, is it necessary to create a new General Affairs Council, made up of ministers who fulfil a coordinating role within their governments and who wield the necessary political authority, as you suggest? This would, in any case, enable the European Council to be freed from arbitration and from policy coordination, so that it can fully devote itself to its real job of providing political impetus and defining guidelines for the European Union. However, creating this sort of Council raises a whole raft of political, even constitutional, issues, as you yourself admit, in some Member States, particularly in those that have a coalition government.
To sum up, Mr President, Mrs Neyts-Uyttebroeck, ladies and gentlemen, I would just like to thank Mr Poos once again for the extensive, excellent and very thorough piece of work that he has done and for the useful proposals contained in the report. Quite frankly, I do not believe that it is the Commission’s role to respond to one or another detailed comment regarding the way the Council functions because, as I have said, each of our institutions, quite naturally, functions autonomously. This, however, does not prevent us from performing a global assessment where there are no taboo subjects, to repeat the phrase that Mr Verhofstadt used this morning, when he stated that there were no taboo subjects where the wide-ranging debate and the Laeken Declaration are concerned. The issue of how to improve collaborative work, particularly in the field of legislation, is not a taboo subject either. The Commission would like to say that it is also in its interests to work with an efficient Council and that the two messages contained in this own-initiative report, in other words, that we must guarantee coherent action as well as a certain level of political representation in the Council’s decision-making, have certainly been heard, Mr Poos. Thank you."@en1
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