Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-12-11-Speech-2-212"
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"en.20011211.10.2-212"2
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".
Mr Martin’s question broadly relates to the problems that non-governmental organisations experienced in gaining access to the Doha Conference in Qatar. First of all, I shall give you some background information. Any member country of the World Trade Organisation can stand as candidate to organise the ministerial conference. It turned out that Qatar offered to host the Fourth Ministerial Conference, and that it was the only candidate. If we cast our minds back, so that we have a clear understanding, this decision was due to be taken several months after the Seattle conference, which may explain why there were not as many candidates as some might have wished.
Doha was, therefore, the only candidate city and it is relatively small in size. Nevertheless, I think that the authorities made a considerable effort – this was something that all those taking part in the ministerial conference mentioned – to be in a position to offer the delegates appropriate accommodation and provide the necessary logistical support. It is true that several delegations had to restrict the number of their participants due to the limited number of hotel rooms. That is true. However, I do not think that it is a catastrophe to slightly restrict the number of participants at such conferences. In any case, I am sure that this saved the taxpayer some money and as for the delegation from the European Union, we were pleased with the way the conference was organised. Furthermore, 20 Members of the European Parliament were in the EU delegation and I believe that they said they were satisfied with the way everything was organised.
It is also true that logistical matters were not helped by the events of 11 September and that many security measures were added to the checks that are normally applied at such conferences. That is true, and it did not make anyone’s life any easier. I would like to reiterate that, as I also said to Parliament some time ago, we asked the Qatar authorities for access for the non-governmental organisations and were granted it. This is what happened, even if the security restrictions caused some difficulties for everyone.
The last point that I would like to stress is that, again for security reasons, a large number of potential participants, whether governmental delegations, parliamentary delegations or non-governmental organisations, decided on their own initiative not to come to Doha.
In my view, NGOs were offered genuine opportunities to put their case at Doha. The organisations that were present were able to contact their national delegations, were able to influence the outcome of the conference and we at Commission level widely encouraged transparency towards the non-governmental organisations. For instance, documents were discussed quickly, meetings were held openly, and everything that favours transparency has been, in my view, significantly improved over the last two years by the WTO secretariats, has been supported, encouraged, and even initiated by the European Union. Furthermore, the Director-General of the WTO arranged a number of meetings, in accordance with the commitment that he had made at the conference held in Geneva in July. I willingly take on board the idea of a code of conduct, which could regulate relations between the WTO and the non-governmental organisations.
To come back to our own delegation, I said that it was made up of a number of MEPs, a number of colleagues of Franz Fischler and myself, more than fifteen representatives of civil society, who valiantly made the journey to Doha and who all achieved the goals they had set themselves. We worked together with them at Doha. If any one of them wishes to give their opinion, I have no objection to them doing so. I myself had many intensive discussions with these representatives during the conference, and also with the representatives of other organisations from European civil society, who were not, strictly speaking, part of our delegation.
To sum up, if I compare Doha to Seattle, I think that we had better participation, greater transparency, a more lively reflection, and that the organisations present had a genuine opportunity to put their case. This certainly had an effect on the outcome of the Doha Conference. I spoke to you this morning on that subject. Overall I think that progress has been made in the way that civil society is managing to make its voice heard as regards multilateral trade policy. This happened between the Seattle and Doha Conferences, this happened at Doha and I am certain that this will happen more often after Doha."@en1
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