Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-10-27-Speech-3-071"
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"en.20041027.5.3-071"2
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"Mr President, today’s crisis shows that the rules for appointing the Commission do not work. Nor will they work where the Constitution is concerned. The prime ministers appoint people they want or, often, people they want to get rid of, and expect us to rubber-stamp their choice. We propose instead that each individual national parliament choose its own Commissioner and hold him or her responsible. In that way, we should have a democratically appointed Commission.
What is the body we now call the Commission? It is the engine of integration. It is not subject to control by elected representatives, be they national representatives from the parliaments or supranational representatives from this House. It operates through 30 000 officials and more than 3 000 working groups, through which the Commission secures influence for itself, and through a network in the Member States that also bypasses the national authorities. The working groups are secret and cannot be controlled by the national parliaments’ Europe committees. The thousands of decisions and laws adopted by the Commission are rarely made in the Commission itself but, more often than not, in working groups involving participants of whom we have no knowledge. Only relatively few votes are taken in the Commission, and the general public is unaware of the results. The Commission administers a budget of EUR 100 billion, but this is not controlled by the Commission’s own accounts department, by the Court of Auditors or by the Committee on Budgetary Control set up for the purpose by the European Parliament. Nor, for safety’s sake, can the Ombudsman obtain any documents he might request.
In the Commission itself, the presidents cannot control the various Directors General, even though it is formally the president who is responsible for doing so. The whole lot of them are, however, in agreement as to the direction to be taken, namely ever more power to Brussels. Every opportunity must be taken to obtain more power, and concessions to transparency are made only rarely. It took Mr Santer four years to have the Commission’s telephone directory made publicly available. It is now on the Net as an experiment. It has taken Mr Prodi four years to have the Commission’s agendas and minutes put on the Net. It took Mr Barroso a day to make the list of Commission working groups available. That was the day before he was to be elected here in this House. He wanted in that way to show that it was he who made the decisions, but then transparency came to an end. We have not been given a promise that we shall be told who participates in the working groups and what they do.
My group is not taking part in the onslaught on an individual Commissioner’s personal beliefs. Nor, however, will we deliver votes to a supranational, anti-democratic organisation which one departing Commissioner described very precisely as a ‘monster’. This ‘monster’ has a monopoly on tabling bills. No one can blame the European Parliament for using its limited powers to reject the Commission, but the undignified hounding of an individual Commissioner shows that the best form of control is obtained if each country’s electorate and own national parliament chooses its own Commissioner and holds him or her responsible. In that way, the Commission would be elected from the bottom up and not from the top down by a qualified majority of prime ministers. The individual Commissioners could attend their national parliaments each week and listen to, and talk with, the representatives of the electorate, and the Commission would then constitute our representatives in Brussels, and the officials its servants. The Commission would no longer be an unruly ‘monster’, and people would stand up and applaud spontaneously if the Commission President were to pass by. There is a long way still to go, and Mr Barroso has not shown that he dares take the leap of becoming the voters’ servant. Today, he has talked with the representatives of the three largest groups. The four smallest groups have not been consulted."@en1
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