Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-11-06-Speech-3-047"
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"en.20021106.6.3-047"2
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"Mr President, we acknowledge – and thank – Prime Minister Ramussen for his endeavours to inject some ideology into the Brussels European Council, to make its scope wider than the dry, tedious debate on the funds we will need between now and 2006, but, as we know, the discussions held and decisions taken at Brussels revolved around the financial winners and losers, and this, along with the matter of how to avoid penalising countries without losing face, was the focus of the work in Brussels rather than the question of how to establish solidarity within a robust, stable institutional framework.
In this fairly uninspiring context, we do, in any case, welcome the fact that the decisions taken at Brussels will allow the Union to present its negotiating position to the candidate countries on time. However, we cannot hide the fact that the agreements on the common agricultural policy are essentially yet another way of putting off difficult decisions until a later date. We can only criticise the Council for not linking the decision on direct payments to a further reform of the CAP and not seeking agreement on the principle of making these payments conditional upon environmental and social requirements, running the risk of perpetuating all those dysfunctional elements and imbalances which make the CAP the most absurd, costly European policy in existence today, harming precisely those small producers of quality produce that we want to reward.
Moreover, we cannot hide the fact that the candidate countries are not wholly satisfied with the agreements reached in Brussels. Indeed, although it is true that, on paper, the Union has undertaken to offset the new countries’ obligation to contribute 100% to the Community budget as of day one with compensatory payments and Structural Funds appropriations, it is also true that there is no guarantee that these countries will be able to absorb these resources for high-quality projects quickly, or at least not as quickly and directly as they will have to pay out the money to the Union’s budget. We would have preferred gradual phasing-in of these countries’ contributions to the Community budget, as was the case for Spain and Portugal. Quite frankly, the impression is that the new countries will have to fund the United Kingdom’s common agricultural policy abatement and that it was only decided at the last moment not to make them contribute to Spain’s Structural Funds too. As regards the Copenhagen Summit, the Union still has to prove itself. As Prime Minister Rasmussen rightly said, enlargement is not yet completely in the bag.
One further comment, Mr President, on the question of Chechnya. We wanted the European Council, in addition to making a few general, salient points on terrorism, to come down clearly in favour of a negotiated end to the Chechen conflict, which is marked by the ongoing violence of the Russian troops, and to condemn the contempt for the hostages’ lives and the KGB methods used by the Russian Government to respond to the attack on the Moscow theatre. We are extremely concerned at the arrest of Akhmed Zakayev in Copenhagen and the laws restricting the freedom of speech recently adopted by the Duma. We hope that the forthcoming EU-Russia Summit on 11 November will focus on these issues."@en1
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