Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-04-24-Speech-5-007"
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"en.20090424.2.5-007"2
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".
Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, this is my third report on the application of Community law and I must say that – with all due respect for the considerable amount of work that we have done, together with the Commission – I do not think that we can declare ourselves to be particularly satisfied. I believe that there are basically three problems, which I would like to mention, and which have been drawn to your attention and, above all, to the attention of the Commission in our report.
As compared with the outset, I can see a tendency on the Commission’s part to pay less attention to what Parliament does and asks, given that in contrast to previous practice we have received almost no reply to the questions that we have asked during the past two reports. I must say that this causes me a certain degree of frustration, since we had all agreed that the issue of the application of Community law was a priority in the ‘better regulation’ agenda.
We have encountered the following problems: the three fundamental issues that we discussed with the Commission were transparency, resources and the length of procedures.
We can see that with regard to the new point that we developed together, in other words the issue of transparency, progress has been rather slow and in fact, with the new regulations on access to documents, the opportunity for those who carry out infringement proceedings, or who request that infringement proceedings be opened, to find out why they have been closed or why they have been opened, is decreasing by any standards.
Secondly, I would like to talk about the issue of defining priorities: the definition of priorities, respect for and conduct of infringement proceedings must naturally involve decisions which are not merely technical but are also political and here, unfortunately, after the three or four years that we have been working on this point, we still have a problem with monitoring and the transparency mechanism, not only internally in other words, with regard to the Commission but also externally.
I would like to give you a couple of examples, particularly concerning Community law on the environment. We know that this is the main problem in the application of European law, and yet both from the point of view of resources and from the point of view of the priority given to this sector, we are still lagging significantly behind.
One of the most interesting issues, and one which was discussed in the most positive terms with the Commission, was that of the reduction in the time taken by proceedings, through a set of mechanisms that had been put forward and in part agreed with the Commission. On this issue too, however, we have remained at a stalemate due to a certain inertia, which I hope in the future can be resolved.
Also, another issue that we had debated at length with the Commission was the ‘pilot project’: this is a project whereby, when a citizen complains to the Commission, the complaint is forwarded to the Member State so that it can give some sort of response. The assessment that some Member States have given, particularly our Commissioner, Mr Tajani, regarding the operation of this pilot project, is relatively unsatisfactory; the fact that the Commission no longer writes directly to those who have been accused of a possible infraction greatly reduces the capacity of an administration that is guilty, let us say, of this alleged breach, to be motivated to respond.
Things are always that way: if an Italian ministry department writes to a region, that will certainly be less effective than a letter arriving directly from the Commission. This is the kind of criticism that has been made of the pilot project, but unfortunately the Commission has not given much of a response. Madam President, I reserve the right to come back in the second part of the debate, to respond to the comments that I am sure Vice-President Tajani will make."@en1
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