Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-05-22-Speech-2-081"
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"en.20070522.8.2-081"2
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"Mr President, I would like to join with those who have congratulated Robert Sturdy on what I think is a good report. The report correctly stresses that these are negotiations that are being conducted between unequal partners and it has been a theme of many of the other contributors this morning. I think the fact that the Commission and the ACP countries perceive the negotiations from a different standpoint is at the heart of many of the problems. If we look at the end of the year deadline, the perception of the Commission is that the deadline is an essential tool for meeting its WTO obligations. From the viewpoint of many of the ACP countries on the other hand, the deadline is being used to rush them into agreeing unsuitable agreements, and the Commission, I think, has to do much more to reassure the ACP countries that the deadline is not and will not be used to browbeat the ACP countries into agreements that they cannot otherwise live with.
On the situation with aid, the Commission says, and Commissioner Mandelson repeated this morning, that the negotiations will not fail for lack of money. But it is unfair to expect ACP countries to make long-term decisions on liberalisation and regional integration without having a long-term view of the amount of assistance that would be available to help them put together the regional regulatory frameworks to instigate new methods of collecting government revenues to make up for the loss of the tariff income or to construct a type of infrastructure which we know from our own experience in the EU is so important to developing our regional economy.
When we move on to the issue of market access, I have heard the Commissioner say in this Chamber that the European Union has no offensive trade objectives with ACP countries. But again, when we hear from negotiators, their perception is that the Commission is pushing them very hard to open up our services markets and to make other market-opening offers.
I say all this in a genuine spirit of belief that the Commission wants a pro-development package with the six regions. The Commission believes it is acting in the interests of the ACP countries, but it must understand that negotiations between unequal partners create suspicion in the weaker partner. When we talk about deadlines, they see threats, when we are vague on the aid package, they see linkage between the amount of market-opening they are prepared to offer and the size of their aid package. If we are to overcome these concerns, then we must bring more openness and transparency to the talks themselves and we must promise that once we conclude the talks, that there will be parliamentary oversight to the finally concluded agreements so that they can be reassured that parliamentarians will be involved in this process from their implementation."@en1
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