Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-07-05-Speech-3-014"
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"en.20060705.2.3-014"2
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".
Mr President, with the Finnish Presidency’s emphasis on productivity, accountability and transparency, ‘Finlandia’ is music to Liberal ears.
I wish you the wisdom of Väinämöinen. I hope that for the people’s lasting pleasure you compose mighty songs for Europe’s children.
For his people’s lasting pleasure, mighty songs for Suomi’s children.
The programme you have presented today, President-in-Office, reflects both the strong reforming tendencies of your government and the egalitarian and innovative impulses of a nation which repeatedly tops the league tables for education, innovation and development. Liberal values will be on the march with your Presidency.
I would like to refer to just a few areas which my group feels to be important. First, the market-driven programme. Priorities like completing the internal market, particularly in services and the energy sector, are key goals for us in the months ahead, as are efforts to deliver a directive on the portability of supplementary pensions and promoting market openings for new technologies. The latter will pay more long-term dividends than any government-funded initiatives on research and development, and provide the growth and jobs and prosperity that our Union desperately needs.
As regards Article 42 – justice and home affairs – your Presidency is right to focus on areas where European Union legislation adds value to citizens’ lives, but in the modern world a wanted man can be halfway across Europe before the policeman has his boots on. It beggars belief that the law still has borders, when criminals do not. For too long, key initiatives on police and judicial cooperation have been stalled in the Council, and even those decisions taken lack the democratic scrutiny that protects our human rights and civil liberties, as we have seen with the inadequacies of data protection legislation.
President-in-Office, the time has come to heed our call to apply the footbridge clause provided for in Article 42 and to make policy in justice and home affairs democratically.
The transparency initiative, which has found one of its key supporters in your Presidency, is one way out of this anti-democratic cul-de-sac. Liberals and Democrats seek your assurance that safeguard clauses will be used sparingly or not at all. But true transparency requires that the transposition, implementation and enforcement of legislation be given much more attention than it has to date.
Three years ago, we demanded that Member States draw up concordance tables showing how they transposed EU directives into national law. Let citizens see for themselves which parts of the law come from Brussels and which reflect the hobbyhorses of national governments. Otherwise, poor implementation and gold-plating will continue to fuel the fire of Brussels-bashers. Yet, since your Presidency started three days ago, I see changes are already afoot. The comitology decision, which gives Parliament the right of recall, giving us equal powers to Council to make sure the law is applied, is a very important step. With greater power comes greater responsibility and I hope that our House will bear that in mind when it meets today to discuss much-needed parliamentary reform.
President-in-Office, you have a big agenda: the agenda of dealing with Asia and the ASEM Summit; the agenda of dealing with Russia. We wish you success in this and we ask you to think not just of engagement, but of promotion of European values, of human rights and democracy, so essential to the development of our world. We wish you success in finding a way forward to an agreement in the WTO, so valuable to our economy and that of developing countries, and we wish you great success with enlargement, though we know that is also in the hands of another very competent Finn, Commissioner Rehn, who is here with us today.
In conclusion, you spoke about public fears of globalisation. These can best be overcome by developing a European consciousness. As Lönnrot did for Finland in the Kalevala, we need to draw on aspects of our common history to create a common consciousness."@en1
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