Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-12-18-Speech-1-027"
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"en.20061218.6.1-027"2
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"Mr President, the Monty Python team once very uncharitably described Finland as a poor second to Belgium when going abroad. Prime Minister, you and your government have shown that Finland is a poor second to none when it comes to running a European Union Presidency.
Mr Poettering has given his final speech to this House. He has been a fair, frank, and I am pleased to say federalist companion. The European Parliament needs an ideological majority rather than a
. We were pleased to work with him in an ideological majority for a while. He will find that this
empty togetherness is nothing but accompanied loneliness.
Nonetheless, we wish him all the best for the future, whatever he ends up doing.
Thank you for your work in bringing Europe closer to its citizens. Following on from the comitology agreement with the Austrians, you have opened legislation to public scrutiny. I believe that 86% of legislative decisions under your Presidency have been taken in public: a total of 90 decisions compared with only 17 last year. That is a great step forward and I hope that the German Presidency will take it further by getting agreement among Member States to publish the correlation tables so that we can see how Member States put into national law decisions taken at European level and make a fair comparison.
Prime Minister, you also have to your credit an agreement on REACH, an agreement on the Services Directive, on which thankfully – whatever Mr Schulz says – we defeated all the Socialist rapporteur’s amendments, an agreement on next year’s budget and an agreement to bring Bulgaria and Romania into our Union.
Liberals and Democrats also salute your efforts to try to get agreement on the footbridge Article 42 clause and we regret that this was not possible at the Lahti Summit, but we therefore disagree with paragraph 3 of the Presidency Conclusions, which says that the Union is ‘making best use of the possibilities offered by the existing treaties to deliver concrete results’. It is clearly not making best use of the possibilities, as you recognise a few paragraphs later, when we say that responding to the expectations of citizens is difficult with the existing decision-making procedures and that the framework needs to be strengthened. I hope the German Presidency will get agreement on Article 42. We cannot wait for a new Treaty and our message to Chancellor Merkel must be:
.
Justice and home affairs is just one example of where such progress is needed. We have talked a lot about migratory flows. Hitherto, too much of the focus has been on security and too little on the economic or humanitarian aspects of these flows. We therefore welcome the recognition in the Presidency Conclusions of the wider aspects, particularly the link between development policy and immigration policy and the need for a legal migration policy opening up the front door a little, in order better to close the back door to illegal migration. More work is needed on illegal migration. It is no good just to have a rapid enhancement of Frontex or permanent coastal patrols. They are only part of the answer. We need to know why people are coming.
If you look at the other things you discussed at the summit about Sudan, if the European Union really recognised the new UN doctrine of the duty to protect, fewer people would be moving out of Sudan. Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan. Unless we are able to provide security and good government and life chances for people there, they will continue to move. It is no coincidence that some of these countries are the countries of origin of the greatest numbers heading towards our shores.
Perhaps the most important outcome of the Summit is paragraph 5: a strong statement on how enlargement has been a success. Clearly if one looks at the Eurobarometer published last week, that message has not got through to our citizens. We need leadership from our Heads of State and Government telling people what a success enlargement has been and how continued enlargement will be needed, once we have our constitutional arrangements in place.
If leadership is needed on enlargement it is needed, too, in ending the isolation of the Turkish Cypriots. On reading the sections in the Presidency Conclusions we see too much leadership has been left to the United States. We are particularly concerned about the Eurojust arrangements signed with the USA. Perhaps if we had the
in foreign and security policy, we would be able to promote European values further and better.
Your Presidency has, in our view, been a success and we hope the return to the land of Santa Claus will allow you a good rest next week, undisturbed, I hope, by the clatter of reindeer hooves."@en1
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"Europa muss handlungsfähig sein"1
"große Koalition"1
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