Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-06-12-Speech-1-064"
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"en.20060612.15.1-064"2
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".
Mr President, I wish to begin by thanking the rapporteur, Mr Cashman, for a clear and useful report. His story about the cemetery keeper reminds me of a university rector who compared his job to being a cemetery keeper. He said: ‘I have a lot of people under me and nobody listening.’
Instead, let each of us, the Commission and Parliament, aim to ensure that our respective procedures – petitions and infringements – are fit for their respective purposes and let us continue our fruitful cooperation and strengthen that as much as possible.
I shall refrain from commenting on some other details relating to processes and procedures.
Let me conclude by signalling my openness to the general message of this report: that petitions are important for democracy and for citizens. The Commission is prepared to do as much as possible to improve our cooperation.
The petitions offer a kaleidoscopic view of the concerns of many citizens today. They cover a wide range of policy areas, they cover practically all the Member States and they cover a broad cross-section of civil society, from the individual citizen right up to the multinational NGOs.
Your rapporteur is right to underline the importance of all the work represented by the thousand or more petitions you receive every year. There is no doubt that the Committee on Petitions offers citizens an important conduit for their feedback on European acts and policies. It thus contributes to a strengthening of democratic control over Community legislation and its implementation at EU, national, regional and local level.
I should like to pick up on three aspects in the report and resolution. The rapporteur was very kind and forthcoming towards the Commission, so I do not want to raise any conflicts here. Much is made in the report of the coexistence of the petitions procedure on the one hand and, on the other hand, the Commission’s complaints procedures, sometimes leading to infringement proceedings. Where there is coexistence, or even overlap, it is natural to make comparisons. I think that we should avoid getting into a discussion about the relative merits of petitions and complaints procedures. Each procedure has its own legal basis and its own specificity and I believe that each of our institutions does well to preserve that, while respecting the needs of the other. In simple language, both procedures ultimately serve to ensure that EU law is applied to the benefit of the citizens.
However, infringements are about the Commission and the Member State. The petitions procedure concerns the individual and their parliament. So each procedure is different in nature. That is not to say that we will not continue to strive for even better cooperation: the Commission remains, as always, at the disposal of the committee.
That brings me to the second point. As you know, the Commission has already agreed to devote more attention to petitions concerning infringement proceedings in its annual report on the application of Community law. It is, furthermore, important to remember that the amount of information given to the Committee on Petitions already exceeds that which is required by our interinstitutional agreement. This is important for transparency.
The motion for a resolution argues that the Commission does not act with sufficient speed and vigour in some cases where a petition and an infringement procedure are running in parallel. It therefore suggests that these procedures need to be better coordinated.
Let me just say one thing about that. It is only natural that the petitioner with a grievance may be in need of urgent redress, but let us remember that the ideal timescale of the individual petition will almost inevitably be shorter than the timescale of an infringement proceeding, which by definition takes a certain amount of time. We have, amongst other things, a duty of collaboration with the Member States, which necessarily implies a multi-stage process. Let us avoid raising unrealistic hopes in cases of overlapping. For the individual citizen, the successful outcome of an infringement procedure is not necessarily and automatically the ultimate and only thing to aim for.
A successful outcome to an infringement procedure might not even directly entail the precise redress that the petitioner is seeking. We have several examples of that. The petitions procedure and the infringement procedure have different and distinct objectives, functions and roles. Thus the efficiency of the Commission’s complaints process cannot be formally linked to petitions."@en1
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