Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-03-20-Speech-3-021"
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"en.20020320.5.3-021"2
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"Mr President, the summit has now appointed a working party that is to produce reforms of the Council’s work, which are greatly needed. At present 70% of all legislation in the EU is adopted by officials in the Council’s working parties, 15% is adopted by the ambassadorial musketeers in COREPER, while 15% reaches the Council of Ministers. I do not have the percentages for what the ministers see. However, I know that legislative power belongs with the electorate and elected representatives, but that in the EU it has been seized by officials and their changing ministers. We could replace our own ministers, but we can never vote for new legislation via elections. If a law appears not to be a good law, it can only be amended if we get the Commission to table a proposal and have it adopted on the strength, as a rule, of 62 out of 87 votes, cast behind the closed doors of the Council.
The European Parliament is able, with an absolute majority, to submit amendments and reject a law during the conciliation procedure, but the European Parliament has not been given the legislative power of which the electorate and our elected representatives in the Member States have been deprived. We still have a growing democratic deficit. I should like to propose that every EU law be dealt with in parallel by the national parliaments. It is there that people can follow what is going on. It is there that democracy begins.
The next reform is, then, to open up the Council’s deliberations to the public. Laws should be debated in public, just as they are in the national parliaments and in the European Parliament. The voting should also be publicly accessible. Elected representatives should have access to all the documents of the Council’s working parties. Why not, moreover, also look at the Ombudsman’s proposals for administrative reform?
During the debates on the regulation on public access to administrative documents, Germany, France and Spain were the three biggest opponents of greater openness. Now, Mr Aznar López has an opportunity to give Spain a different image. It could be the June summit in Seville that goes down in history as the place where the EU was genuinely opened up to its citizens. I hope, too, that it will be the place where we put an end to the big countries’ attempts to conquer the presidency of the EU. There should be no group presidencies in which each of the five large countries gets four or five small states to join them in a group presidency. There would then be the risk of the large country’s taking the lion’s share of the power. Small countries must also be able to represent the common foreign and security policy to the outside world. We must be seen as a form of cooperation between independent countries – not as a new state. If the large countries want to act jointly, they must merge to form a common state. They must not be allowed to use our common institutions to marginalise the smaller Member States."@en1
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