Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-07-21-Speech-3-105"
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"en.20040721.6.3-105"2
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"Mr President, dear Mr Barroso, my group submitted three questions about greater openness and better control. You visited our group and acknowledged officials’ lack of accountability. We now hope that you personally will answer our questions frankly.
We want a President who himself dares to answer the crucial questions from the most critical group on such a pre-arranged occasion. We want a President who dares, and is able, to answer the questions himself and who dares to accept responsibility for the organisation as a whole. We have, for example, asked for an internal list of the more than 1 350 working parties in the Commission, which are all funded by European taxpayers. Who are the members of these? Who go to the meetings? Who have their travel expenses refunded? Why cannot we know these facts? Why, in the new accounting system too, will no one be in a position to reveal whether the same people have their travel expenses paid for more than one meeting in the same week? I am not saying that this happens. I am merely saying that we cannot check up on whether it is happening.
We want a Commission President who is prepared to make all the information and vouchers available to the Ombudsman, the Court of Auditors and the Committee on Budgetary Control. Mr Barroso, we are prepared to be pleasantly surprised, but I am obliged to say that we were given many more pledges by Mr Prodi when he took office than we have so far been given by yourself, and he, for his part, delivered the goods. Agendas and minutes from the Commission’s meetings can now be read by everyone on the Internet. It took Mr Prodi a whole legislative period to fulfil that pledge, but he kept his word. The Commission’s telephone directory is also available on the Net, provisionally and as an experiment.
Now, we must go further and have full scrutiny of the legislative process. We want to know what the Commission is proposing in the Council’s working parties. We want to know what is going on in the Commission itself. We also think that you should inaugurate a new era by providing courageous whistleblowers such as Paul van Buitenen, Marta Andreasen and Dorte Schmidt-Brown with full restitution of their civil rights. By pricking their bubble, whistleblowers woke the bureaucrats out of their dream. In yourself, I hope to see a President who is everything but the bureaucrats’ dream, and I am able to offer my group’s critical opposition. I hope that we see a President who dares to make available a list of the committees that get ideas on everything from rules governing the size of strawberries to a common criminal law."@en1
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