Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-02-11-Speech-3-020"
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"en.20040211.1.3-020"2
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"Mr President, I was hoping that Kofi Annan’s speech, which we heard last week, would provoke an outbreak of democracy on the part of the Commission and the Council in particular, but I see that in the end it has done no such thing.
You have both referred to Tampere. It seems to me that Tampere was very well balanced from the point of view of rights and duties, status and control. It is quite clear from the list of the various measures, operations and agreements you have given us today, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, that those measures are all concerned solely with security; that makes me extremely worried because I see some members of the Council being truly diabolical in their thinking. When I hear talk of outsourcing the examination of asylum applications, I really feel that everything has gone wrong. What really worries me is that I feel that the decisions being taken today in the Council or more appropriate formats – decisions by 5, or by 5+5, depending, at any rate on formulae that are seldom very clearly democratic – are an attack on democracy and the European project. I believe the penalty that can be expected for such an aberration would be quite clear, and Kofi Annan said it himself: tomorrow we will have a Europe that is meaner, poorer, weaker and older. I do not see that as a prospect that any of us, or any of the citizens of the European Union or third countries, can relish.
In asking the Court of Justice to annul the decision on family reunification, the European Parliament is sending you a clear message that the Council is exceeding the bounds of democracy and I think if I were in your shoes I would want to take heed of that very strong warning from the European Parliament. I also think that instead of interpreting as it may Council decisions of which it does not really approve, the Commission would do better to interpret them by consulting its NGO partners. It would do well, with all associations, European civil society and all parliamentarians who stand up for rights, international conventions and democracy, to really cause that outbreak to happen so that in future all decisions are taken in a spirit of parliamentary co-decision as desired in the draft Constitution."@en1
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