Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-10-25-Speech-4-104"
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"en.20011025.1.4-104"2
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".
We voted in favour of the report on "Openness and democracy in international trade" in order to assert our demand for a reform of the World Trade Organisation towards greater transparency and fairness (especially in regard to the settlement of differences) and also the strengthening of control by the peoples.
A double ambiguity, though, exists in this regard, both at European level and at the level of the WTO. As regards the European Union, successive reforms of the Treaties have practically excluded the national parliaments from control and ratification of the common trade policy. The Nice Treaty, which is currently in the process of being approved, effectively completes the work while excluding them from negotiations touching on services and intellectual property. Neither de jure nor de facto does the European Parliament take over, and in any case, even if it did gain a real right of ratification, the end result would still be the overall enfeeblement of democratic control, because of the abolition of any direct power on the part of national democracies, which are closest to the peoples.
From this point of view, the European Parliament's proposal that a consultative parliamentary assembly should be created within the WTO looks like the beginning of work on another level of dispossession. Such an assembly would in fact risk giving greater legitimacy to the disregard of the opinions of national democracies, and the putting in place thereby of "regulations" the effect of which would be to confine them even more. There is then a need to assert most clearly that the objective of the consultative assembly is to improve information, but not under any circumstances to replace the national parliaments in any way.
For us, in fact, the first of these "regulations" to retain, is that each and every people, expressing itself directly or through its national parliament, has the right to choose what kind of society it wants to be and what laws shall apply within it."@en1
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