Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-09-06-Speech-2-029"
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"en.20050906.6.2-029"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, let me start by saying something about procedure. We are dealing here with a piece of the European Parliament’s legal history, for it was in 1992 that the Commission came to a decision on the subject, and today finds us debating it at – and let me stress this – its
reading. When we vote on it, as we will do tomorrow, we will be bound by the rule that a majority is required to reject or amend it. Speaking as someone who was not even an MEP at the time of its first reading, I have to say that I find it intolerable that neither the Commission nor the Council are similarly bound in the case of a proposal made at a time when most of us were not yet MEPs. Even though the Rules of Procedure permit it, I was not able to table any amendments in the Committee.
That is why we should all press for such curiosities to be done away with. It is also a reason why the CDU/CSU has tabled this motion for the directive to be rejected; we did so not because we reject justified measures in relation to unnatural optical radiation, but in order to call on the Commission to come up with a proposal that would be credible in terms of the Constitution and of Lisbon. President Barroso and his colleagues always get carried away when analysing the reasons why the Constitution was rejected, and regularly invoke the Lisbon objectives. If you put them on the spot on the subject of regulation and directives, the line they take is: ‘the sunshine directive? I was not in office at the time’. At the same time, though, there is no shortage of officials in the Commission who quite simply ignore whatever their bosses say. Better regulation? Of what interest is that to those to whom the protection of consumers is entrusted, those who are supposed to take action to deal with this? For them, it is ‘business as usual’.
In Germany, this is not an issue for only one end of the political spectrum; I would just like to remind Mrs Jöns of the President of the German Council of Cities. This may have passed her by during the summer recess, but, in any case, the President of the German Council of Cities, who is also at the same time the Lord Mayor of Munich, and, as she will be aware, a member of the SPD, has held up the sunshine directive to ridicule. We see, then, that there is in Germany a broad political consensus to the effect that we are in favour of rules that are practicable. The compromise would take us closer to them. The motion for rejection calls upon the Commission to come up with something better; if it is not passed, I call upon you to at least support the compromise motion."@en1
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