Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-01-13-Speech-2-242"
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"en.20090113.26.2-242"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, this is a report on the status of public access to European Union documents and also an opportunity to make some suggestions. In the short time we have available, I want to raise three important points.
The first is about the Council. European Union governments meet in the Council with law-making powers and, like any law-making assembly, they should be bound to make their work and their decisions public. I wish to emphasise this particularly because amendments have been tabled by the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats for a split vote on certain paragraphs. I hope the split votes are not taken to delete significant portions of the report. For example, paragraph 3 of the report asks for action to be taken following the judgment in the case brought by Maurizio Turco, a former Radical Party MEP, who won a case in the Court of Justice over the publicising of legal decisions taken by the legal services of European institutions and also over the obligation to disclose the identity of Member State delegations to the Council. We are entitled to know who is voting in the Council and how. I therefore hope that no one will vote against this paragraph 3, or paragraph 9, which asks for information about what is happening within Coreper, the Committee of Permanent Representatives, and asks that they should disclose the meeting documents and not secrete all the international policy papers away as diplomatic documents. This is a very important point!
The other point we raise concerns Parliament, our Parliament, because we must be the first to publicise what we are doing. We Italian Radicals call it the ‘public register of elected representatives’, in other words a register where we can find out everything about the activities of MEPs, who is present, who is absent, how they vote and, of course, the money they are paid. Beware though, and I say this because an application has also been filed for a split vote on paragraph 5, it would be a mistake to think that if we keep some of this information confidential – I am addressing Mrs Cederschiöld, who I know is sensitive on this issue – we will really just succeed in leaving ourselves more exposed to aggressive, demagogic attacks on MEPs. We know that some fellow Members have filmed other MEPs, they have turned themselves into spies on other MEPs. The way to get around this is not merely to prevent it, but to publicise our work in full, foiling the people who want to peer through keyholes and opening our doors by broadcasting parliamentary committee work, meetings and all the proceedings of this Parliament over the Internet.
The third point I want to raise concerns document formats, because the PPE-DE Group has also requested a split vote on paragraph 7, concerning this point. In this paragraph we ask for documents to be created using open-source word processors, technologically speaking, as well as effective multilingualism and technologies that allow persons with disabilities to gain access to information and documents. I hope that no one in this Parliament is against open-source multilingual access using technologies that facilitate access by people with disabilities, because this is an essential aspect for a portion of European Union citizens.
We know that the Commission has proposed a reform of our rules and we will deal with this in the Cashman report, but this resolution is our first opportunity to lay down some points of reference for this Parliament. I hope it will not be wasted and that all the crucial matters I have sought to raise in this report will not be in vain."@en1
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