Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-09-26-Speech-4-014"
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"en.20020926.1.4-014"2
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"Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the Socialist Group, I join with Roy Perry in saying that we should not let this occasion pass without expressing our gratitude for the work of Jacob Söderman, the first Ombudsman of the European Union, and for the success with which it has been rewarded.
I would also like to say that we can congratulate ourselves on having had the courage, in 1995, to entrust this great task to – if I may say so – a rather unknown representative of a new Member State. I would like to congratulate Jacob Söderman on having focused our attention on the essential matters, namely the total reform of the European institutions, in which secretive dealings of one sort or another gave way to the principle of openness and transparency.
Above all, I also thank our Ombudsman for the very quiet, calm, but determined way in which he did his work. We know the examples, and that we could not take an easier way, but we see from the successes chalked up by the administrations in the EU's northern countries – Finland, Sweden and Denmark, which score lowest on the index of corruption – that there is no such alternative. I share the disappointment expressed earlier at the spectacle, over and over again, of the hesitancy manifested by the so-called Brussels bureaucracy.
This is an area in which we need to press on. It was not least this opacity, this inability to identify what was going on, that brought down the European Union's last Commission. By touching on sore points, Mr Söderman has done the right thing. Let us recall the delayed payments. The Commission is one of the worst bodies in Europe when it comes to paying up, yet see the self-assurance with which it lays down rules for all economic actors, while itself being in fact incapable of making payments in a proper manner! In the most simple terms, this is about bringing administration closer to the citizen. It is the experience of all of us, again and again, that the people back home talk about how big our bureaucracy is in Brussels. We know that it is a very small one, but it acts big.
I have to say, as rapporteur for the Budget, that I am a little ashamed – although I am aware that it is mainly the fault of the Finance Ministers of the fifteen Member States – of our manifest inability to equip the European Ombudsman's office with the staff its importance warrants. We in Parliament are doing our best, and we will find a solution, but the finance ministers obviously think that enlargement is not actually in the offing and that the Ombudsman will not need extra staff. This really saddens me, and it is something I have to say in the hearing of many members of the public.
Emphasis has been laid on the good cooperation between the Ombudsman and the Committee on Petitions. It is Jacob Söderman's leadership that has given us the modern institution of a European Ombudsman. Now, perhaps, it is our responsibility, and that of the Committee on Petitions and of Parliament as a whole, to bring our activities up to a comparable standard."@en1
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