Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-03-15-Speech-3-231"
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"en.20060315.21.3-231"2
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Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I wish to thank your House and the chairman of its foreign policy committee for the thorough report on the Commission’s 2005 strategy paper. This topic is the subject of constant discussion in the Council, not least with reference to the practical decisions that we have to take. As has been reported, we had in Gymnich a very good and thorough debate on this subject, and we will continue with it. I believe it to be quite essential that we should do so, since refusal to debate is a cause of public suspicion, and we must take care to reinforce the confidence of the European public in the European project as a whole and to create more trust and more clarity. That is one of my core concerns in my position as President-in-Office, and it is for that reason that I welcome the debate that is now underway.
We, too, are closely monitoring the implementation of the Ankara protocol and will ensure that it is reviewed this year in the relevant bodies and in accordance with the Council statement of 21 September 2005.
We regard the commencement of the accession partnership with Croatia as equally important, and have welcomed the Croatian prime minister’s undertaking to ensure unconditional cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the continuation of the same. We share your House’s view that Croatia is contributing more to regional cooperation and that further efforts are required.
I have said what needs to be said about the Western Balkans. The Council’s strategy for obtaining Serbia and Montenegro’s full cooperation with the International War Crimes Tribunal is also clear, and we sent out a very clear signal relating to it at our last meeting. We support the UN special envoy in Kosovo, Martti Ahtisaari, in his work, and I believe that the European Union, through the efforts of its special delegate Javier Solana, is capable of helping, in an enormously positive and diplomatic way, to reach an agreement on the conditions for the 21 May referendum.
It is because we need public support for the enlargement process that we have to improve the flow of information and our public relations work, while also explaining the individual steps better. We quite simply have to make it clear that we will be thorough and circumspect, and that, while we will not act precipitately, we will not arbitrarily step on the brakes either. This is something I regard as an essential consideration.
Heaven forbid that we should, by introducing this concept of ‘assimilation capacity’, impose an additional and arbitrary obstacle; on the contrary, it is about being aware, becoming aware, and making others aware of certain quite central and self-evident fundamental truths. Every step in enlargement, every new accession requires two participants, one of them being the European Union, and the other the country that is to become a Member State.
We want to prepare for the next accessions as best we possibly can. In this sense, too, Salzburg was important to me, for it was important that we should look back over the last three years and forward to the next practical steps, in that it enabled all of us to be clearer about where we stand and what actual preparedness there is, whether at home or abroad. We can also have confidence in the expert knowledge that we gained during the last enlargement and should be determined to apply the knowledge of transformation that we have on a partnership basis.
As was said in the earlier debate, ownership, too, underlines European standards, which, though fair, must be stringently complied with, as was made unmistakeably clear in the Commission’s report in November 2005.
In this debate, though, we should also be honest about the expectations people have of the European Union, not least the expectations of the people who live in it. We owe each other clarity, and it is we alone who can give it to each other. We must not make out cheques with nothing to back them up.
Moreover, I urge a more nuanced approach to each individual country, for we need to be fair in our dealings with each and every one of them, and we must make that a certainty. The presidency will therefore be giving particular attention, in the ongoing debate, to the contributions made by your House.
Let me sketch out, in just a few words, the actual decisions that we are currently working on. The first has to do with Romania and Bulgaria, concerning which the reports are encouraging and we already have the goal of accession on 1 January 2007, albeit with the possibility of its being delayed by a year. Turkey and Croatia’s accession negotiations have begun; the starting pistol was officially fired on 3 October last year. We are now engaged in screening the
that is to say in analysing the
We, the presidency, have written to Croatia and Turkey to invite them to set out their negotiating position on the first chapter, ‘Research and Development’.
We share your House’s view that continued progress in the fulfilment of all the political and economic criteria and in the effective realisation of fundamental rights, the rule of law and democracy is required. As regards Turkey, we in the presidency welcomed the closure of the Orhan Pamuk case and made it clear, at the recent meeting of the troika in Vienna, that we expect the trials still pending under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code to be dealt with similarly, or, indeed, the law to be changed."@en1
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