Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-07-05-Speech-3-325"
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"en.20060705.21.3-325"2
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".
Mr President, first of all, let me, as a German, congratulate Commissioner Frattini on yesterday’s football result and then, rather quickly, move on to the matter in hand. There is nothing at all personal about what I shall say about it; all I want to do is counteract some misconceptions that are becoming current.
We are not debating this issue today because the Commission wanted us to, nor, indeed, out of any desire for it on the part of the Council, which, lamentably, left the Chamber before the debate began. We are discussing this issue because the committees that have to work with these agreements – and on this there are major differences in this House – decided that we would.
Reference has been made to the British Presidency’s putting this subject on the agenda, and that it indeed did, and because – and this is where comitology comes into it – certain Committees of this House, the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs being one of them, were no longer willing to write out a blank cheque and to delegate something without having the right to check up on what was done with it, and that is what we are talking about today; not about giving this House a present, but about something that is the least that it is entitled to in a democratic process.
I am, then, all the more astonished by what has been going on recently. At the outset, Commissioner, you said that you were in favour of democracy, and you ended up saying that the sunset clause was less than appropriate. Any parliament is perfectly entitled to place time limits on legislation, and I think it intolerable that the Commission or the Council should make statements of that sort or try to deny this House that right.
I would just like to remind the Council that, with reference to the draft Constitution and in the debates on it, it went so far as to agree to the delegation having the right of call-back, yet today, it wants nothing to do with it. Progress has been made – yes, there is no disputing that – and now we have to build on that progress. The agreement must prove its worth in practice. For example, the committees – and here I am talking about my own – received the first consultative draft from the Commission as late as just before the summer break; after the summer break, the eight-week deadline had expired, and we were then told that our decision was expected in three months’ time. It is practice that will demonstrate that the agreement works and that we do not have to abandon our rights.
What I would like from the Commission, and even more so from the Council, would be to see those who, in the developing world, plead the cause of democracy and the right of codetermination – and that is mainly done by the foreign ministries – at least applying that same standard in their dealings with the European Parliament; that really would be a great step forward."@en1
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