Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-07-07-Speech-1-226"
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"en.20080707.22.1-226"2
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".
Mr President, all legislative bodies must be subject to scrutiny at all times and must also be prepared, as we are, to carry out self-monitoring. I fear, though, that the self-monitoring in the present report goes too far; I would go so far as to call it self-censorship. If this report is adopted in its original form, it will mean Parliament itself proposing to restrict the right of its Members to put relevant questions to the Council and the Commission. This of course makes sense in itself, but the report also states that it is up to the President to decide whether the respective question may be put. Thus the President of Parliament is to decide which questions it is appropriate to put to the other EU institutions. We are thus introducing additional self-censorship and, on top of that, permitting the President of Parliament to exercise censorship too.
I should like to remind the House that we are the only directly elected body, and thus have a particular obligation. Our task is to exercise parliamentary control, and so we cannot on any account impose self-censorship, which is open to abuse. Of course, we all have a moral obligation not to waste any institution’s time with irrelevant questions, but we cannot accept the setting of ‘objective criteria’ for relevance. There are no such things as objective criteria in politics and, if we set them, we risk them being abused."@en1
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