Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-03-10-Speech-2-082"

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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, we decide laws at European level for several hundred million people, and that is why transparency is required. We all agree on the objective – transparency is important, and I also think that we, as the European Parliament, have no need to hide. We are under the media spotlight, we are watched by journalists, our work is already transparent. We all agree on the objective, but we must be allowed to argue about the methods of achieving it, and just because someone disputes and wants to get to the bottom of those methods that does not necessarily mean that he or she wants everything to be done behind closed doors. Rather, such people are often just people who ask questions. Here in the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats, we have a lot of critical questions, such as about the competition procedure in the Council, such as on the issue of whether we need to make all the legal service’s documents public, such as the question of whether the private affairs of an MEP should now be the subject of public discussion. We fight for data protection for our citizens, yet MEPs are to be expected to make everything public. Asking questions like this is allowed. The key point, the reason why there is also a lot of scepticism in our group, is the question of the legislative process. When we vote, everyone can look up how individual MEPs have voted. All MEPs must also bear responsibility for the way they vote. This is already in evidence as things stand. In a legislative process, though, in the trialogue, when we discuss things amongst ourselves, there also has to be a place for carrying out negotiations. We know that, if everything were public, the form of negotiations that we have today would no longer exist because you would be putting your head above the parapet as soon as you tried to seek out and to bring about political compromises. That is why there is still a large amount of scepticism in this group about this proposal. We will clarify the final position of our group tonight. I would like to make one thing clear on behalf of my group, however, which is that we do want transparency, but the methods of achieving it must continue to be up for discussion. We do all agree on the objective. Looking at the individual European institutions, it is not Parliament that is the problem. It is, rather, the Council, which is not represented here today, that represents the problem as, alas, we have no idea what goes on in the Council’s working groups."@en1
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