Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-10-23-Speech-4-019"
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"en.20081023.4.4-019"2
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"Madam President, together with Volvo and IKEA, the institution known as the Ombudsman is Sweden’s best-known contribution to the global community. It is a very important institutional innovation for democracy in general and the EU institutions in particular. Why? Well, because an Ombudsman is there to ensure that people can demand their rights in political and bureaucratic structures that are becoming ever more complex and, thus, non-transparent. Nowhere in the democratic world is complexity and non-transparency more dominant than in the byzantine power structure that the EU has established and that it is constantly extending further.
It is rare for me to feel any enthusiasm for the reports presented here in the European Parliament. Whenever I do so, the reports concerned are those relating to the internal market or an environmental issue of some kind. Mrs Zdravkova’s report is another exception to my rule, in which we see a picture emerge of the Ombudsman working pretty effectively to fortify individuals against the byzantine hegemony that is unfolding. I am thinking of information provided to the general public via a properly updated website, information sheets, networks of national and regional ombudsmen, conferences and, especially, meetings and other contacts with the system’s eurocrats, designed to make the latter see that they are there for the benefit of Europeans, rather than Europeans being there for the benefit of them.
At the same time, it is regrettable that Europe’s powerful elite pursues a European project associated by most people with impenetrable and byzantine bureaucracy. In anticipation of a grassroots reaction against this development, we in the European Parliament should strengthen the institution of the Ombudsman. We should therefore vote in favour of Mrs Zdravkova’s report and, especially, welcome the demand that the Ombudsman have full access to EU documents in the course of his investigations."@en1
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