Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-11-12-Speech-1-056"
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"en.20011112.5.1-056"2
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".
Madam President, this week marks the provisional end of the discussion on the ‘public access to Parliament documents’ Regulation. Technically, this Regulation is entitled ‘access to documents’, but it ended up with a different name in the vernacular. In May, after months of negotiations with the Council and Commission, we were able to bring the Regulation to a successful end. This was an important moment for me personally, because I have fought for more transparency in the European Union for years.
On a final note, this Regulation and change to our Rules of Procedure are very important because they grant our citizens more access to internal documents of our Parliament and of the entire European Union, which improves transparency. Public confidence, which is very much needed, will also increase as a result. I welcome this and that is why I hope that we can approve these Rules of Procedure on Tuesday.
According to the Resolution, each of the institutions, namely the Commission, the Council and Parliament, must ensure that the Regulation has been incorporated in the institutions’ own rules of procedure, work instructions and meeting procedures by 3 December. For our Parliament, this meant that we needed to check out our Rules of Procedure to establish whether more improvements were needed. We often feel that the Commission and the Council fail to come up to the mark in this area, but we have noted that there is room for improvement in one or two areas in our Rules of Procedures too. When I use the word ‘we’, I would like to make it clear that I also want to include my fellow rapporteur, Mr Cashman, with whom I have worked closely. The assessment was made in the Committee on Constitutional Affairs, but also in the Committee on Citizens’ Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs. That is logical because both committees had worked together before. I thank Mr Cashman very much for the constructive manner in which we have always managed to enter into consultation.
So what are the proposed changes to our Rules of Procedure for which we are asking your backing? First of all, what matters is the right of all citizens in the European Union, in other words, including those of third countries, to access EP documents. That right may have been in place for European citizens, but this was not the case for citizens from third countries registered in the EU. On that score, therefore, we need to broaden the scope. Moreover, this corresponds to the ‘Freedom of Information Act’ of the United States. We are therefore not doing anything out of the ordinary.
Secondly, the definition of documents which are eligible for access must, according to the Regulation, be widened compared to the current Rules of Procedure. It should include all parliamentary documents, including the preparatory documents, such as working documents by rapporteurs or by parliamentary delegations. There is no need to include MEPs’ personal correspondence or the groups’ internal documents, because these are not official parliamentary documents. The European Court of Justice has made statements to this effect, which we should, and want to, observe, of course.
The third requirement in the Regulation for which our Rules of Procedure do not provide, is the requirement to register all public documents and to include all documents by name and number in this registration. Furthermore, this registration must be available and accessible on the Internet. That will require the necessary efforts to be made and that is why the institutions have until June to achieve this. We must wish our team and the deputy Secretary-General all the best for this task, for it is quite a job to organise the whole system. We will have a look in June to see whether everything has turned out well.
A fourth requirement for which our present Parliament does not provide, is access to the Minutes of the Parliament’s Bureau. That cannot be such a big problem because these Minutes become public after a certain time anyway. The only difference is that our Rules of Procedure did not make it compulsory before, and now this obligation has to be stipulated in the Rules of Procedure. In fact, my advice would be to publish those Minutes even earlier than is now the case. After all, our entire Parliament knows what is being discussed the afternoon after the meeting anyway.
Fifthly, we still maintain the system of closed meetings in our Parliament when delicate matters are discussed. Our proposal is to leave those meetings
but to verify the Minutes against Articles 4 and 9 of the Regulation. Anything which does not fall within this must be made public via the Minutes. I hope that this could persuade the committees not to have the meetings declared closed unnecessarily.
The final point concerns the conciliation between the Commission, the Council and Parliament in the event of disputes. Parliament must be involved in the conciliation, and it appears to us to be the best solution if a Vice-President of the European Parliament were to be appointed especially for this purpose. We would also like to see this laid down in the Rules of Procedure so that it is clear who is responsible.
This concludes the most important changes to our Rules of Procedure. At the final vote, the Committee on Constitutional Affairs backed these amendments by a large majority. There are not that many and I therefore believe that we can bring this to a good conclusion here as well. Four additional amendments have been tabled, including one by my group and three by the Greens. I do not have much of a problem with that of my group, but we should take another good look at those by the Greens, for it makes no sense to go beyond what is stipulated in the Regulation. As we should have dealt with this when we were discussing the Regulation, I am tempted to say no to these amendments."@en1
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