Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-12-12-Speech-3-406"
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"en.20071212.37.3-406"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner Kyprianou, we have complied with the request to handle this matter swiftly. We are dealing here with something urgent, which is precisely why we are still here at this late hour.
The question is, of course, how this urgent situation arose. You have said something about that. I had a look through the documentation and came across the very regulation that we want to amend today. It dates from 17 December 2003. That regulation prescribes that, with effect from 1 January 2008, ‘electronic identification according to the guidelines referred to in paragraph 1 […] shall be obligatory for all animals’. There are one or two exemption clauses, which I shall omit, and then it says, ‘The Commission shall submit to the Council, by 30 June 2006, a report on the implementation of the electronic identification scheme, accompanied by appropriate proposals, on which the Council shall vote by qualified majority’.
In short, the matter lies very far back in the past. The Commission’s report to the Council was evidently never submitted, and there was no comeback from the Council. Are you signalling something? If you did submit the report, all the better, but then there was no response from the Member States. And then we got into this pickle, realising that the deadline could not be met. So far, so bad, but then you proposed that, instead of perhaps setting a new deadline, we should leave it to the comitology procedure to set the date. In other words, the setting of the deadline would be your decision. We should then have taken all this trouble for nothing, and so the committee decided that the provision on compulsory electronic tagging should enter into force on 31 December 2009 and be applicable from 1 January 2010, two years later than prescribed in the original regulation. Be that as it may, the important thing is that we have a date. The committee also said that a report should be submitted on this matter too.
The problem with your proposal, of course, is that you are drawing more and more decision-making into the realm of comitology, just as you did with the old regulation of 17 December 2003, in which the provisions and application arrangements relating to the regime of electronic identification were delegated to the Commission through the comitology procedure. At that time there was also to be a report to the Council but no report to Parliament. As a result of this practice of subjecting everything to comitology, Parliament is divested of its decision-making rights and its powers of scrutiny, and so we only discover at some later date that obligations have not been honoured.
If you had not come with these amendments now and requested urgent treatment because you were under pressure to meet the deadline, we should have thought that everything was alright. But things were not alright! That must be a warning to us in Parliament not to delegate too much to the Commission but to continue exercising our powers of scrutiny.
Now there have been a couple of amendments. You said you could not accept them. The committee stipulated that the rules should be binding. That, in fact, is also laid down in the basic regulation, which, as we all know, is not being repealed but only amended. Now there are amendments tabled by you, Mr Stevenson, one of them jointly with Mrs McGuinness, which propose that the system be made voluntary. Well, if we make it voluntary, we might as well forget the whole thing. What would then be left to prescribe? We could resign ourselves to the fact that all cats are grey in the dark. I therefore believe that we must stick with compulsory rules and that these compulsory rules must include a date and a report to the European Parliament.
It will be a lesson to us that this report has made us stumble more or less by chance across this truly unusual way of proceeding on the part of the Commission and the Council.
I hope, Mr Kyprianou, that I am not being unduly harsh in my criticism, but you can imagine that, as I drafted the report and prepared myself for this evening and consulted the relevant documentation, I had to rub my eyes when I saw all the things that can happen in our European institutions. Both Parliament and the Commission – and we as individuals too, as far as I am concerned – surely have an interest in ensuring that this sort of thing does not recur and become a habit."@en1
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