Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-12-14-Speech-2-016"
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"en.20041214.5.2-016"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I am very pleased that during today’s debate many fellow Members of various political groups, some of them quite unexpectedly, have spoken at length about sustainability. I believe that such interest is important, since I am sure that this issue will become a genuine priority for the Commission too.
The second concerns the issue of impact assessment. New laws should not be assessed arbitrarily but in a way that is based on uniformly applied criteria. The European Parliament is moving slowly on this front. We know that companies and the economic world in general are much more active in this field. We must encourage the Commission and Parliament to assess new laws on the criteria of sustainability and social impact as well.
The third point relates to the reopening of the issue of access to documents. We are extremely dissatisfied with the current situation and sincerely hope that in the coming years we will succeed in obtaining a positive outcome.
The fourth and final point concerns a very complex issue, of which we will no doubt have occasion to speak again, which is the Commission’s attitude to contraventions of Community law by the Member States. We are extremely concerned about the delays that have built up and the fact that the Commission now seems to have practically abandoned this priority, particularly in the environmental field. We very much hope that in the future the Commission will reconsider this priority, since the credibility of the European Union also depends on its ability to ensure that its laws are obeyed.
At a time when many citizens have a growing distrust of the European project, the main strategic objective of the new Commission and all the other Community institutions ought to be to return to being visibly effective in improving the quality of life for citizens, to become a positive instrument for democratic growth both within and outside the European Union and to transform the Union into an area of technological innovation focusing on ecological and social sustainability.
We believe that three commitments are necessary to achieve these goals. The first relates to consistency in terms of the objectives established and the capacity to ensure they are achieved. Therefore, we strongly urge the Commission to be more determined in taking into account the EU’s key commitments, such as sustainability, social cohesion and gender equality, in all its policy proposals, and to make a real commitment to restoring a balance among the three Lisbon Agenda pillars – economic, social and environmental – in order to avoid promoting inflexible economic objectives at the expense of the quality of our citizens’ individual lives.
We call on the Commission to put forward bold proposals for a coordinated effort to give fresh impetus to investment in environmental technologies and measures to promote employment. As far as competitiveness is concerned, we would like to see the relevant indicators extended to include qualitative, social and environmental indicators too, such as income distribution, poverty and energy efficiency.
We think that consistency is also measured in terms of the capacity to ensure that the commitments undertaken are complied with. We know that a very large number of Member States are not complying with the Kyoto Protocol targets and we therefore believe that the ways in which the Commission will help these countries to comply with the protocol are an important ingredient in achieving consistency. On this point, we would like to relaunch our old proposal for a climate stability pact, which would lay down a joint management system for the Kyoto commitments that would be not merely repressive but also positive.
The second commitment which we certainly must re-evaluate relates to having the courage to reject an easy conformism that ignores the European Union’s responsibilities in the world; we must, instead, make Europe a point of reference and a model for those in the rest of the world who are fighting to defend human rights and freedom. This point is extremely important to us. We cannot refrain from expressing our thoughts on human rights in China and Russia or on the war in Chechnya for commercial and economic reasons. We will soon be speaking again about the Dayton accords, now reaching their tenth anniversary. We need to take action on this point as well, and we hope that the Commission will be able to put forward some positive initiatives.
The third and final commitment relates to the ability to truly represent the interests of the European Union as a union, by managing not to be overly influenced by the power relations between individual countries and with the Council in general, and by finding true alliances between those in the European Parliament, the voluntary sector and business who share the idea that the European Union is much more than the sum of the EU governments. To this end, we call upon the Barroso Commission to reconsider, and perhaps to withdraw, the Bolkestein directive, to defend the REACH directive tooth and nail, to put forward a new directive on services of general interest, to abandon or at least to review the former Commission’s policy on GMOs and to take a practical and courageous approach to opening legal immigration channels.
Mr President, in conclusion I would like to mention at least four fundamental points in the interinstitutional agreement which we would like to enter into with you.
The first, of course, relates to the code of conduct for Commissioners and a serious approach to the issue of conflicts of interest."@en1
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