Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-11-29-Speech-4-016"
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"en.20071129.3.4-016"2
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".
Mr President, so for the thirteenth year running the Court of Auditors has rejected the implementation of the EU budget. Why has that happened? Are the politicians, bureaucrats and citizens of the EU notorious fraudsters? Of course not! The problem is that the EU wants to regulate in detail what happens in a region with 23 countries and half a billion inhabitants. It is this that opens the door to fraud, abuse and error. The entire organisation needs to be reformed from the bottom up. There are two ways to go.
Firstly, we must move from perverse detailed regulation to systems in which poor Member States get aid without detailed stipulations on how it is to be used. Secondly, we must ensure that the guilty are identified. This in turn requires maximum transparency, that whistleblowers should be treated as heroes, not traitors, and that journalists should be welcome to scrutinise the EU’s stewardship. None of these three requirements are in fact met. A relevant example is the fate of journalist Hans-Martin Tillack. He detected fraud in Eurostat but was himself charged with offences by OLAF. He lost his case in the Belgian court system and in the European Court of Justice, but now he has been cleared by the European Court of Human Rights. The EU’s role in this sad story shows how far we have to go if we want to change its nature as a bureaucratic establishment. Is there the will to do that? I doubt it."@en1
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