Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-09-24-Speech-3-053"
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"en.20030924.1.3-053"2
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"Mr President, the Convention was an assembly of all parliaments, all governments, and the Commission. The Intergovernmental Conference is only an assembly of all the governments. It is quite clear that, in this historic process of giving Europe a constitution, it is no longer the Intergovernmental Conference that enjoys the greater democratic legitimacy, but the Convention. I would therefore see it as quite utterly unacceptable for the Intergovernmental Conference to wreck the political substance and hence the political compromises that the Convention arrived at.
Few are saying this – although Mr Voggenhuber has done so in very clear language – but the thought is in the minds of many that the issue of whether the Intergovernmental Conference should alter what came out of the Convention, is also a power issue between the governments and parliaments of the European Union. It has to be made perfectly clear that any change in what the Convention produced would be a vote of no confidence in the parliaments, which made up a majority in the Convention. That would certainly have an effect on the process of ratification, whether that be by the parliaments or by referendum, and hence on public acceptance of the Constitution.
Commissioner Barnier, you always took a very progressive line in the Convention. We did a lot of work together, and we did it well, but now I am disappointed in the Commission, which accepts the position of certain governments rather than that of most of the parliaments, which do not want any alterations to the Convention’s draft. As I see it, this indicates that the Commission is not up to date. Nor do I know what the IGC is meant to produce by way of a positive outcome. You can just imagine how they will again be haggling, the sort of cattle market it will turn into, and things can, in fact, only get worse. I am not very confident about all this.
Finally, Mr Dimitrakopoulos and I were rapporteurs together in Nice, when Parliament demanded much and got little. With the Gil-Robles/Tsatsos report, we are now asking for little and hoping to get much, by which I mean that we are hoping that the IGC will change nothing, and that would be a great deal. I congratulate Mr Gil-Robles and Mr Tsatsos on having formulated this in such exact terms in the historic period in which we find ourselves!"@en1
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