Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-12-12-Speech-2-017"
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"en.20061212.8.2-017"2
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"Mr President, this regulation has been in gestation for almost two years. At times, the pressure on Parliament to cave in, to divide, to give up our legislative role, was barely tolerable. I have been taken aback by the willingness of fellow MEPs, at times, to give other institutions carte blanche in this important area, so long as some little interest of theirs or influence was not lost. However, I wish to pay tribute to my colleagues in the Committee on Development – Members who did not allow pressure to divide us, across all groups, and who, in the end, carried the day. I should also like to pay tribute to the secretariat of the Development Committee and to the secretariats of those groups that worked constructively with us in these negotiations.
Having threatened to reject the original Development Cooperation and Economic Cooperation Instrument (DCECI), as it was called, which sought to take away codecision powers by changing the legal base from Article 179 to Article 181a and to include developed countries and expenditure on non-development issues in a development instrument, we have negotiated with the Council and the Commission an instrument which few thought possible 12 months ago, one that will streamline EU activities for the developing world while maintaining accountability and transparency.
I should like to pay tribute, in particular, to the negotiating team who accompanied me at those talks, to the successive presidencies for the work they have put in and to the Commission for a good outcome. I have one reservation, however. I believe it was Voltaire who said, ‘I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ Having approached the whole of the negotiations in a way that sought to accommodate, I was very disappointed that, on one particular issue, my views were not accommodated.
It is not about diluting the availability of health services for women in need. In fact, if my amendments – which were modest – had been carried, the Cairo Conference and all the related issues would have been respected. Indeed, having been at the centre of compromise, finding and supporting others, I was surprised that my modest proposals did not receive proper consideration. Part of the reason for that seems to me to have been a piece of written advice that was circulated, which pre-empted my proposals by claiming that PPE policy had been decided. As the signatures to the amendments show here today, that is not the case and should not have been stated, especially at what was a very sensitive time in the concluding stages of the negotiations.
I can support the general content of the common position, with that one reservation. I think it is a very good outcome for us: Parliament has gained, insofar as we have maintained codecision under Article 179, which is a very important principle to us. It is to be time-limited legislation. The specific instrument for development policy is this instrument; it will not have any other content. There will be more detailed financial provisions: the financial provisions of the proposal were another area of very serious concern for the Committee, as they were extremely general and very far from the level of detail to which Parliament, as part of the budgetary authority, was accustomed. That has now changed, and the common position now includes a breakdown of funding by programme and, in some cases, within programmes.
We are also breaking new ground. The new DCI will, for the first time, enshrine in a legal text the internationally accepted definition of development policy set out by the OECD Development Assistance Committee. A Commission declaration attached to the new DCI will contain, also for the first time, the benchmark that the Committee on Development has been using since 2003 to promote increased focus on the key MDG sectors of basic education and basic health, and the Commission has never before accepted the Committee’s 20% benchmark for these sectors, which has been accepted on this occasion.
In relation to democratic scrutiny, further headway has also been made on the matter of the dialogue between Parliament and the Commission on the draft strategy papers to allow effective Parliamentary scrutiny of the implementation of the DCI, and I wish to thank Commissioner Ferrero-Waldner and Commissioner Michel for their letter to me and to the chairperson of the Committee confirming that. Parliament does not want, or need, to be involved in micro-management, but it does give us an opportunity, through whatever structures we decide ourselves, to get involved at an early stage, thereby giving Parliament a much improved role in the whole area of transparency and accountability.
With the exception that I mentioned, I consider the common position as established by the Council to be a very good outcome for the European Parliament. As I said at the outset, I doubt very much that anybody 12 months ago would have thought that we could have achieved what we did achieve. But it shows that, when Parliament stands together, when the different groups do not allow themselves to be divided and are determined not to give away the powers of this House, we can, with the other institutions, come up with a very good instrument and one that ensures that the prerogatives of this House are protected."@en1
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