Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-11-18-Speech-4-013"
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"en.20041118.4.4-013"2
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".
Mr President, I would like to begin by saying that having become accustomed to compressing my thoughts into 60 seconds, it is something of a luxury to have five minutes to expound upon any issue.
I have one final brief remark to make. This Parliament needs to review the manner in which the Council deals with Question Time in this House. I sat in on Question Time yesterday and the President-in-Office refused to answer virtually every single supplementary question put to him. I believe this to be contempt for Parliament and I intend to make a formal complaint, but I also believe we need to review how we deal with this. We either have a real Question Time where the Council is held to account in this Parliament, or we abandon Question Time entirely.
I would like to thank the Ombudsman, Mr Diamandouros, for his comments here today, particularly in relation to the report. I would also like to thank him for the excellent job he has done since his appointment. He has confirmed the confidence that this Parliament placed in him on his appointment in April 2003. In my view, he has more than justified that confidence. I would also like to pay tribute to the former Ombudsman, Mr Söderman, who undertook groundbreaking work in establishing the Ombudsman's office.
Mr Diamandouros has engaged in an astonishing level of activity, not only in dealing with the thousands of complaints he has received, but in preparing his office for enlargement and in visiting almost all of the Member States, including all ten new Member States.
One of the most striking statistics in his report – apart from the ever rising number of complaints, which the Ombudsman quite rightly points out is not necessarily a feature of deteriorating administration – is the fact that 75% of the complaints received by the Ombudsman's office did not in fact relate to his mandate. That is not necessarily a bad thing, because it clearly indicates that the citizens see the Ombudsman's office as a port of call for problems they have with European institutions. The Ombudsman very correctly ensures that all of those complaints are redirected to those bodies which can provide some redress for citizens, whether that is the Petitions Committee, the national Ombudsman offices, or other national institutions.
The role of the Ombudsman's office clearly is to ensure that there is good administration by the European Parliament, the Commission and the Council. The important role that the Petitions Committee plays is of course at the other side of that equation, where we seek to ensure that national governments and local authorities comply with European law in the interests of the citizen.
The report that we are dealing with today identifies a number of key reforms which in the view of the Petitions Committee need to be carried out if we are to ensure the democratic functioning of the European Union. Openness, transparency and accountability are key building blocks to building a European demos. We argue therefore that there is now a need, in the light of ten years' experience of the Ombudsman's office, to review its statute. This need is also a result of the establishment of OLAF and indeed the fact that, quite shortly, we are hopefully going to ratify a constitution which contains a charter of citizens' rights and which will clearly enhance the role of the citizen in Europe. The review must be undertaken by the European Parliament in cooperation with the Ombudsman's office and I hope that we can get review under way quite soon.
The Commission also needs to amend its procedures to allow parliamentary scrutiny and investigation by the Ombudsman of the infringement procedures. We are currently denied the right to scrutinise those procedures, which I believe is improper. The Council, in my view, must now accept Parliament's amendments to the Ombudsman's statute on access to documents, as the Ombudsman pointed out. This Parliament, through the Constitutional Affairs Committee and the Almeida Garrett report, pointed out that there was a need to amend that statute, because at the moment, Article 3(2) imposes restrictions in terms of the Ombudsman's investigative powers and, as it is currently worded, denies access to documents which can be refused on duly substantiated grounds of secrecy and accuracy. Access to documents from a Member State that are classified as secret may be granted only where that Member State has given its prior agreement. In addition, employees of the institutions called on to testify must speak 'in accordance with the instructions from their administrations and shall continue to be bound by their duty of professional secrecy'.
This is not an acceptable situation in this day and age. The Ombudsman, in whom Parliament and the other institutions have put their confidence, does not have access to documents and is denied access in this way.
Finally, I would also like to urge the Commission – pending the adoption of a legally binding code of good administration for all three institutions, which is provided for in the new constitution – to now buy into the voluntary common code which the Council and the Parliament are already applying. It would be right and proper that they should do that."@en1
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