Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-11-05-Speech-3-088"
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"en.20031105.7.3-088"2
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"Mr President, the results of the EU Convention have now been printed in a number of splendid, blue-backed books, but they are completely unreadable. There is no glossary. Who in the Council is responsible for sending out thick books in all the languages without glossaries which would have enabled people to locate those places in which they were particularly interested? As taxpaying citizens, we pay billions to the EU’s numerous information offices which then, however, use the money for propaganda rather than for providing genuine information.
It is bizarre that it is in my office, rather than in the institutions, that we are to produce the reader-friendly editions of the draft Constitution which people, including politicians, have a chance of being able to understand. We have annotated the margins with many cross-references so that there is no need to jump backwards and forwards to see whether unanimity or a qualified majority is required. We have underlined all the key words so that the draft Constitution might quickly be skimmed through, and we have prepared a comprehensive alphabetical glossary so that words such as ‘subsidiarity’, ‘religion’ and ‘defence’ can be looked up and the places quickly found where they are mentioned. We have, moreover, made our work available on the Internet free of charge in all the languages. Not everything is ready in all the languages, but the most important parts are there and can be downloaded quite freely from my homepage with the address ‘bonde.com’. We have also prepared approximately 1 000 definitions with relevant links to the website ‘euabc.com’, and anyone can freely download them to their own computer and have future changes sent to them completely automatically via e-mail.
This is a task that the Council should have carried out. Instead, they have broken an agreement made with us in Democracy Forum and printed the draft Constitution without attaching the minority statement. We had a crystal-clear agreement with Giscard d'Estaing and John Kerr. We signed the document describing the overall outcome in return for having the minority statement printed, so that EU citizens might be able freely to choose between the majority’s and the minority’s visions of Europe.
I wish now to call upon the Council to ensure that the minority statement is printed together with the draft Constitution, and I am pleased to make our reader-friendly editions available to the Council free of charge. It is strange that we who are opposed to the draft Constitution are to pay for its publication so that it can also be read."@en1
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