Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-11-12-Speech-1-063"
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"en.20011112.5.1-063"2
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"Mr President, Mrs Maij-Weggen’s report on public access to Parliament documents is an advance we cannot but support. The problem is everything that is not included. The main problem is that the Commission and the Council do not supply Parliament with documents from the phase during which legislation is prepared, and that is, of course, the phase in which people have an interest in participating so as to influence the content of the legislation. Our rapporteurs and committee chairmen can often get hold of the relevant papers. Members of the executive can, more often than not, obtain what they need from their political friends in the Commission or the Council’s delegations, but such documents are not, and will not be, available to all MEPs or to the public. Nor does the report make any change to the disgraceful framework agreement which the majority of Parliament has entered into with the Commission and which divides MEPs into first and second class Members according to whether or not they have access to confidential information.
It might be relevant to distinguish between rapporteurs and ordinary MEPs, but the distinction is not made according to who has need of the confidential information. It is all right to impose tough sanctions on MEPs who breach confidentiality, but it is contrary to the principle of equality, and thus unlawful, to regard committee chairmen as especially eligible, while a rapporteur with the same need does not have access in the same way. Moreover, it is completely insane and contrary to every parliamentary tradition that Parliament’s Committee on Budgetary Control, the ombudsman and the EU’s own Court of Auditors are never in a position to check all the documents concerning the Commission’s discharge of its office. This, too, is something which Mrs Maij-Weggen’s otherwise quite excellent report does nothing about. Nor are those of us who are to approve the enlargement agreements able to obtain the screening reports, even if they do not, in fact, contain anything other than an analysis of the gap between existing EU legislation and the candidate countries’ arrangements for transposing the EU regulations into their own legislation. This situation will scarcely be changed when the regulation regarding public access to documents comes into force. We are still in the dark ages when it comes to transparency, but even a small step in the right direction must be endorsed, so it will be the green button I press tomorrow in order to encourage Mrs Hanja Maij-Weggen to continue working for greater openness in the EU."@en1
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