Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-12-15-Speech-3-183"
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"en.20041215.6.3-183"2
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".
Madam President, Commissioner, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, ladies and gentlemen, my group also views Bulgaria's progress towards accession as a success story, albeit with a few necessary caveats on points of detail. We therefore believe that this House can vote in favour of Bulgaria accession to the European Union in 2007 with a clear conscience.
We support Mr Van Orden's report and speaking personally, I would like to thank him and Mrs Dobolyi from the Socialist Group in the European Parliament for the good cooperation. As Mr Van Orden himself has said, he has deliberately kept the report brief. I therefore suggest that we discuss all the other tabled amendments, some of which are very detailed, next year when we deal with the longer report which will then be due.
Bulgaria is well on track to join the European Union in 2007. I would therefore like to take this opportunity to highlight a fundamental problem, namely that of genuine compliance with the principle of merit. The Commission and the Council have both stated that each candidate's accession should be based on individual merit. However, this is incompatible with a situation in which a candidate country which fulfils the criteria is held back by the slower progress made by other countries. The countries making swifter progress thus accede too late while the candidates making slower progress join too early. To put it simply, the good performers are being penalised while the laggards are being rewarded. This situation must change.
The credibility of the Union as a whole is damaged if its practices conflict with the principle of merit. Commissioner Verheugen amply demonstrated this with the 'big bang' enlargement in May this year, which damaged the Union. A better option would have been for well-performing candidates, such as Estonia and Slovenia, to have been able to join much earlier. For this reason alone, namely to preserve the European Union's credibility and not because there is any doubt about the European prospect of either of the two candidates, my group has always been in favour of separate accession treaties for Bulgaria and Romania. Mr Watson reaffirmed this position this morning in this Chamber.
I therefore urge the Commission and the Council, but also my fellow Members in this House, to ensure, during present and future enlargement rounds, that the principle of merit is not just proclaimed with pomp and ceremony, only to be ignored in favour of package deals, but is actually implemented in practice. In this context, a gratifying sign is the Council's decision to adopt differentiated approaches to Bulgaria and Romania in the chapters on competition and justice. Simplifying the mechanism to invoke the safeguard clause in the case of Romania will enhance the credibility of the accession process and thus the credibility of the European Union itself. On a more general note, I believe that we should be conducting this debate not in Strasbourg, but in Brussels."@en1
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