Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-12-16-Speech-1-048"
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"en.20021216.5.1-048"2
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".
Mr President, I do not think that anyone can dispute the fact that the European Union’s system of legislative acts is incredibly complicated, lacking in transparency, incomprehensible to the general public and sometimes even difficult for us to understand.
The third and last element is the implementing bloc, in other words the implementing regulations. In this respect, we must apply three simple principles. First of all, we must take on board the fact that, from now on, the legislative authority is not just the Council, but is, in fact, the Council and Parliament acting in accordance with the codecision procedure. The powers that are currently bestowed upon the Council, particularly under Article 202, must therefore be exercised by both arms of the legislative authority. Moreover, we must admit that we cannot regulate with 25 Member States in the same way as we have up to now. We need to share more work between a legislative authority which authorises and supervises and an executive authority which adopts implementing regulations and which, in our view, must be the Commission. Clearly, this will happen, subject to a call-back procedure enabling both arms of the legislative authority to ascertain the conformity of regulations with the statutory provisions on which these regulations are based.
These, therefore, are the main points. There are, of course, many other things to say about this report, but we believe that if we were to introduce this major distinction between a constitutional bloc, a legislative bloc governed by codecision and an implementing bloc which would put an end to comitology procedures at least as far as consultation is concerned as the Commission desires and which would replace comitology with a genuine monitoring by the two arms of the legislative authority, then we would gain in transparency, democracy and effectiveness, and perhaps some people in Europe would, at last, begin to understand what we are doing!
This complexity can certainly be explained and justified. It is not easy to have a legal system that has overall responsibility for the other legal systems – of 15 States at the moment, of 25 States in the future – which are fundamentally different. Undoubtedly, the European Union also has to deal both with conventional problems relating to the hierarchy of legislation which arise within each of our Member States – the Constitution, laws, implementing regulations, individual decisions – and with problems specific to the Union relating to the ever-delicate relationship between the powers of the Union and those of the Member States.
There is, therefore, a justifiable complexity and we shall never have a wholly simple system. That said, there is also a completely unjustifiable complexity in this matter. We are experiencing legislative chaos, procedural chaos and linguistic chaos. Legislative chaos when we see that decisions which are by nature fundamentally different are adopted for example in the same framework, namely the constitutional framework. There are provisions relating to policies and others relating to the institutions. We also have a decision of a budgetary nature – on resources – taken in a virtually constitutional framework. On the other hand, since there is no clear distinction between the area of general legislative measures and that of regulatory measures, there are implementing measures which are adopted in the framework of the law and there are measures of a general nature which are adopted in the framework of implementing regulations.
Lastly, we are certainly experiencing linguistic chaos, since every effort is made to avoid giving a name to what we are doing. We adopt laws, but we take care not to describe them as laws. We use the term decision, in other words something which comes from the depths of the hierarchy, to describe both individual measures and measures of a constitutional nature.
No one understands anything. Added to that is the problem of pillars and the fact that, absurdly, and I struggle to understand why, we decided that it was possible, that it was even necessary, given the sensitive nature of some of the decisions to be taken, for example decisions relating to fundamental rights in criminal matters, to have recourse to procedures that are less democratic – not involving the European Parliament – less effective and which could be adopted unanimously. They would also be less legally certain without the backing of the Court of Justice for their adoption. Make of that what you can.
Why must something which directly concerns fundamental rights not benefit from the guarantees and procedures applied to legislative acts established elsewhere?
The report proposes to sort all this out and to apply a simple principle: one act, one procedure, one description, one name. We therefore propose to arrange this into three main blocs: the constitutional bloc, which will be divided into – I think that this is the opinion of the Convention as well – two parts: Part A, which includes everything that is strictly constitutional, namely the values, principles, objectives, institutions and procedures which enable the Union to operate, and then Part B, which will include the main political principles currently contained in the Treaty.
The question in terms of this bloc is whether to develop the ratification procedures. Your rapporteur put forward proposals, not all of which were supported by the Committee on Constitutional Affairs, but it is clear that we must develop them if we want to avoid 25 States rejecting the possibility of developing this legislation outright.
Secondly, a legislative bloc. A legislative bloc is simple. We must call a law a law, and we are obviously proposing to make a distinction between organic laws, which would be rather formal laws that are subject to a specific procedure, framework laws, which would replace directives, and ordinary laws, which would replace legislative regulations, and then to make a distinction between laws on financial and budgetary issues, which would, obviously, deal with financial and budgetary matters. Let us call all of these laws, however, because they are laws. And above all, let us state very clearly that what characterises a law is codecision, and that codecision must become the only decision-making procedure for the whole legislative bloc. There are, of course, specific applications, particularly in financial matters, but this is the path we must take."@en1
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