Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-12-11-Speech-2-032"
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"en.20011211.2.2-032"2
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"Mr President, Madam President-in-Office of the Council, Mr President of the Commission, we are faced with two dilemmas here. The first dilemma we face is that as President of the Commission you have quite rightly, and we must be fair about this, presented a political programme. However, the political programme needs to be underpinned by the legislative programme required to implement the political objectives, and that is what is missing.
Secondly, your programme does not really address the problem that we have, in fact, implemented very little of the 2001 programme. You did at one point suggest that Parliament and the Council were to blame, but I believe that the Commission is really responsible for this.
Thirdly, this House has, particularly this year, either rejected or substantially amended various Commission proposals. How are you going to cope with the framework that this Parliament has set? Your Vice-President, Mrs Loyola de Palacio, could perhaps help you here, and particularly in the fields of the environment and of transport there are very few proposals and indications as to how “sustainability” is to be made a reality.
We all know that there is a whole raft of problems with implementation. In your paper you do indeed refer to implementation problems. But the Commission, too, has implementation problems. From the time when the Commission takes decisions and makes financial commitments to the time when monies are actually paid out, it is not uncommon for not just months but whole years to go by. That is why it is also important for the Commission to consider how it can improve its own implementation, and, of course, also how national governments can improve implementation of their legislative intentions or the legislative intentions of the European Union.
That brings me to the dilemma over the Laeken communication, a dilemma that I have personally and probably share with most of us here. It is a good paper and its goals are good. The only problem, Mr President of the Commission, is this: why it is so ambivalent, so tentative, and so vague? There is one sentence in which the Commission considers that it is opportune to examine the possibility of providing the Union with a constitutional text. Why do you not come out and say quite plainly that you are in favour of such a text, whether you call it a constitution or a charter or whatever? This kind of language typifies the way in which the Commission fails to clearly express what it stands for. I believe that at this particular moment this is especially important, as we are to have a convention. Except that this convention will chiefly consist of Members of Parliament from the individual Member States. We are talking here about representatives of our national governments, whereas for the Community method, which is quite rightly a matter of concern, there are Members of the European Parliament and representatives of the Commission. If the Council – and I am addressing this comment to you, Madam President-in-Office – on top of all that decides to appoint a former prime minister, or as now seems likely, a former president, as president of the convention, rather than a former President of the Commission, then I fear that the convention will from the outset be stigmatised to some extent by the fact that the majority of its members will not be guided by the Community method, and that the majority will perhaps not be particularly interested in strengthening the Commission and the European Parliament.
Mr Prodi, I believe that at such a stage and in the present situation, the Commission document that you adopted at the end of December should have used clearer language. You partly admitted that in your speech to us today. It is not a question of saying we could, we ought to or we should – it is question of the Commission saying that it believes we must strengthen the Community dimension, and of the Commission saying that it believes Parliament should be strengthened as the central legislative institution of the European Union. To that extent we are faced with a dilemma about saying that you are right. It would be unfair to reject what you have said today. But the dilemma we face is that in such a sensitive political situation we need a Commission and a Commission President who are willing to say in even stronger, clearer and more unambiguous terms what needs doing – namely that the European Union as a whole needs to be strengthened, and that the Community method will take Europe into the future."@en1
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