Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-06-22-Speech-3-107"
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"en.20050622.14.3-107"2
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".
Mr President, I have to admit that, as recently as a couple of weeks ago, I did not believe we would ever get as close as this to adopting our Members’ Statute. If anyone in particular is to be thanked for this unexpected turn of events, it is the Luxembourg presidency, although I can well imagine that it would have preferred – and regarded it as more important – to achieve success elsewhere.
I would also like to thank the President of this House for his efforts in this matter, along with the Chairman of our Committee on Legal Affairs. Our being so close to having the Statute owes much to our former fellow Member and rapporteur Willy Rothley’s dedication, to which I would like to pay tribute, and which the President-in-Office of the Council has already mentioned. I hope I am doing what he would have wanted in recalling three fundamentals that have always underpinned our calls for a common statute.
Quite apart from anything prior to that date, it was the introduction, in 1979, of direct elections to the European Parliament, and the progressive improvement of its rights and prerogatives as the joint legislator for the EU, and its budgetary authority, that made it wholly inappropriate and improper that the rights of its Members should be subject to national law and that we should be dependent on national parliaments. As is well known, one consequence of that is that we, Members of a single Parliament, are now subject to 25 different national systems of regulations, which makes a mockery of the principle that all Members of this House are equal.
There is some justification for the criticism that has been levelled at the internal arrangements, including the improvement in low basic rates of pay. All these things give us at least three good reasons why any Members’ Statute is better than none, but there is no doubt that what we now have before us, having for a long time been bounced back and forth between the Council and this House, adds up to more than that. It adds up to a balanced and respectable proposal, and one that resolves the presenting problems to which I have already referred, although we have to take on board the need for long transitional periods as we move towards a standardised system.
Along with others, I personally would have liked certain arrangements to be different; I would, for example, have liked to see higher gross pay and to have us making our own pension contributions, but this is evidently neither the time nor the place to introduce many different and mutually contradictory individual variants. If we want to have a Statute, then this is the only one we are going to get, and it is for that reason that my Group is going to vote in favour of it tomorrow. We also perceive a problem in Recital 12, against which we have already voted in the Committee on Legal Affairs. We have asked for a split vote on it, and my Group will be voting against Recital 12, even though we do not want the Statute to be brought down at the last hurdle by something that is a current problem, but not one with any legal significance.
We also have a problem with the amendment to Article 23, as adopted by the Committee on Legal Affairs, to the effect that the European Parliament, being a European institution, can make payments not only in euros, but also in the currencies of countries outside the eurozone. I think it would be inappropriate for an entity such as the European Parliament to make payments in anything other than the euro, and this would also entail numerous administrative problems for the House. We will therefore be opposing this addition, for which no provision was originally made.
I would like to reiterate my warmest thanks to all those who have played a part in this, while also pointing out, for the sake of fairness, that we want to make a number of additions to the resolution that we shall be adopting tomorrow. Our particular concern is with expressing our desire for an Assistants’ Statute. It is only fair and right, if we MEPs are to at last have one set of rules for all, that there should also be one to put the legal position of our staff on a new footing. This is not to make the one dependent on the other, but we who are Members of this House should do everything in our power to offer our staff fair arrangements."@en1
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