Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-07-06-Speech-3-468"
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"en.20050706.35.3-468"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, there are certain things I would like to reiterate in order to firmly repudiate the insinuations and deliberate disinformation spread in recent days by the Liberals and Social Democrats about the reasons for this debate.
Why are we having this debate? We are having it because the Conference of Presidents, having already decided to invite representatives from Romania and Bulgaria to come, one year ahead of their countries’ accessions, to observe the work of this House and take part in it, suddenly reviewed the decision and – the Social Democrats having changed their minds – overturned it. We are having this debate because, when the Conference’s resolution was revised, a date was set that anticipated the Commission’s progress report and hence also the naming of a final date for the countries’ accession, which means that they, and the countries that joined us in 2004, are not being treated equally. We are also having it because the President of this House failed, on Monday, to inform us of the fact that he had already sent them a letter of invitation.
The issue has never been about when the accession of Bulgaria and Romania is to take place. The political decision has been taken. Now that we have decided what to do, nobody wants to apply the brakes. Like most of the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats, I voted in favour of the accession date for Romania and Bulgaria being 1 January 2007; what happens after that has also been decided. The facts of the situation do, though, lead me to regard the decision by the Conference of Presidents as both premature and wrong. I find it particularly regrettable that the President, on Monday, withheld from us important information concerning his actions.
Nobody wants to disinvite anyone we have already invited, and we look forward to having them working with us. Our sole concern was and is with the issue of whether we take ourselves seriously, of whether the matter in hand is more important than the date, of whether equal treatment is more important than the small change of day-to-day politics. The question of how we treat one another and the candidates for accession is too important to be handled with so much emotion, and to be the subject of so much disinformation, as we have seen from our competitors and rivals in this House since Monday."@en1
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