Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-05-15-Speech-1-089"
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"en.20060515.15.1-089"2
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"Mr President, better lawmaking is one of the Commission’s priorities, and this initiative has been welcomed by both the Committee on Constitutional Affairs and this House as a whole. There is indeed a great deal of clearing out to do where our legislation is concerned, some of which will involve simplifying and codifying packages of laws, but it will also be necessary to withdraw those that are no longer appropriate, and it is at this point that I would like, not only to thank Mrs Kaufmann for presenting a very good report, but also to make three observations.
On Wednesday, in the German
Chancellor Merkel raised the question as to whether we too ought to bring in the concept of discontinuity between one legislative period and another, so that laws would lapse and have to be reintroduced. This was a problem that we had with the Bolkestein directive, when the old Commission had proposed something that its successor certainly did not want in that form, not least because of changes in circumstances and in outlook, so I do think it would be a good thing if the Commission – at the beginning of its term of office, at any rate – were to sift through the proposals on the table in order to determine which they are going to keep because they fit in with their programme, and which they are going to withdraw on the grounds that their substance or something else makes them obsolete.
My second observation is this: Mr Corbett said, and rightly, that Parliament acquired the right of codecision over a period of time and that there is therefore something missing from Article 250(2), in that it states only that the Commission can no longer withdraw legislation once the Council has delivered its Common Position, but it does not state that it could not do so either following the first reading in this House. There is a loophole in the Treaties, and the only acceptable way to fill it is for us to be very sincere in our dealings with one another, and – as has been said today several times over – for this House to be given a say when the Commission contemplates withdrawing proposals, at least when we have gone past first reading.
I can tell you, Mr Vice-President, that we even said that you could withdraw a proposal even following the Council’s Common Position if the Council turned the proposal into something it had not been, for it seems that, on two or three occasions, the Council adopted a resolution that was the precise opposite of what the Commission had intended to propose, and we were advised by the legal service that you would, in such a case, still have the right of withdrawal.
The third thing I want to say is that you mentioned the growth and employment strategy as the yardstick against which these sixty-eight proposals had been measured, and I am glad that you said that this was an inevitability in the case of European law on associations; I live in the Saar-Lor-Lux region, which borders Lorraine and Luxembourg, and I could tell you some stories about the difficulties civil society organisations there have with establishing associations that cross borders. The journalists’ Inter-Regional Press Institute, for example, tried to, and then ended up somehow doing it under French law, because its chairman lived in France, while other associations have had recourse to Luxembourg or German law; that is not an appropriate way of going about things. This is an area in which you should be doing more, perhaps by coming up with a more modern proposal. Overall, though, we are working well together in this area."@en1
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