Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-12-15-Speech-3-221"
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"en.20041215.7.3-221"2
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"Mr President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I believe that more honesty is called for. I am most grateful to Mr Lagendijk for his demand in this respect, even though we have arrived at different conclusions for Turkey. He is absolutely right: we must demand honesty in relation to Romania as well.
In my view, this obviously means that we must dispense with a few of our dogmas. The first is that deadlines which have been mooted at some point in the past are now regarded as more sacred than the progress made or the realities of the situation. Let me be blunt. We will not do ourselves any favours if we abide by 1 January 2007 as a date for Romania's accession.
Secondly – and Mr President-in-Office of the Council, I am directing these remarks specifically to you, as we had the pleasure of discussing the budget, among other things, with you – we are talking about a period for which we still have no budget, as we have yet to adopt a new Financial Perspective to cover the period from 1 January 2007. If you cling to your second dogma, namely the figure of 1%, we will be unable to cope with this financial burden. We cannot argue that Europe is continually expanding and its agenda is becoming longer, while money is becoming increasingly tight. Please be honest and make it clear that there is no funding. We need to negotiate the Financial Perspective first, and then we will see whether everything adds up.
Thirdly – and again, let me be blunt – I have heard every speaker talk about the problems which we still have to overcome, not us, that is, but Romania, namely corruption, democracy and the rule of law. Just what do we mean when we talk about membership of the European Union? Is this not the precondition, as we learned today at noon? According to the majority of Members of this House, this is not the precondition for the opening of negotiations. I take a different view. Ultimately, however, before we are handed an accession treaty – and we have been told that this will be available within the next six months – everything has to be in place. We are deceiving ourselves if we proceed on the basis that monitoring processes and clauses which are built in but will never come into force because they require unanimity in the Council are enough to justify our confidence and convince us that everything will work out just fine.
That is why I am appealing to you, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, in relation to the drafting of the presidency conclusions on Friday. I realise that you have a problem in that you have little to show for your presidency. However, no one is reproaching you: during the six months in which you held the presidency, Europe was operating below par. We had the European elections, and then it took some time for the Commission to be appointed and confirmed in office. No one can blame the presidency for this. However, you are responsible for ensuring that we do not deceive ourselves every six months. That means that we should not claim, in Council documents, that significant progress has been made and improvements have yet again been achieved when this is not the case.
I therefore appeal to you to be honest when you draw up the presidency conclusions on Friday. I appeal to the House as well: let us take an honest vote on this issue tomorrow."@en1
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