Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-04-26-Speech-3-060"
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"en.20060426.10.3-060"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, I can tell Mr Schulz that, in the ‘other country’ the political hue of whose government he seems to be unable to recall, it is the Liberals who are in power. It may be difficult for a German social democrat to imagine, but there are such things in Europe as Liberal Prime Ministers – there are, indeed, several of them.
Ladies and gentlemen, as has already been made clear by Mrs Neyts-Uyttebroeck and Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, we Liberals want Bulgaria and Romania to join the European Union, and they will do that on 1 January 2007, subject to all the national parliaments ratifying the accession treaty, which is what it currently appears likely that they will do. Not everything, of course, is as yet exactly as it should be, and much remains to be done. What representatives of the Bulgarian Government have to say about the attitude of the country’s justice system to reform is contradicted by what is reported by German judges who have been there, and it is for that reason that I myself think it right that the Commission should give serious consideration to whether sensitive areas such as justice, the economy, and the internal market need to be monitored, and report back on the subject either in May or in the autumn.
When our counterparts in the national parliaments vote on the accession of the two candidate countries, many of them will be able to rely on the latest report from the Commission, but we voted at a time when it looked as if Bulgaria was outstripping Romania in the reform stakes. What has happened since then is evidence of the unsurprising fact that we do not possess the gift of prophecy, and so we should not act as if we did. What we must do in the case of future enlargements is to take care that we vote on them close to the date of accession rather than a year and a half beforehand, and I want to make it clear that that is our fault and not the fault of the candidates for accession.
Secondly, the Commission cannot recommend that an accession be delayed; so it says in today’s
and the newspaper is right, for what would happen if its recommendation, for want of a few votes in the Council, was not complied with? There would be two countries sitting in the Council, a majority of which would previously have been against either of them being present at all. No, that is not on, and it shows that Article 39, the treaty’s deferment clause, is, in the final analysis, toothless.
That Bulgaria and Romania will accede is not a matter of doubt; both countries have achieved a great deal. We, too, though, have much left to do in order to improve our enlargement policy, and I would like to add that I am very glad that we are having this debate in Brussels rather than in Strasbourg."@en1
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