Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-05-05-Speech-2-439"
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"en.20090505.30.2-439"2
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Mr President, after the large cake that was the Corbett report, I do not know whether this is the cherry; it is more like the little cake you get with your coffee, just as they slip you the bill.
As for the right to take follow-up action, we have extended it – or rather clarified it – to a degree, as in the past the Committee on Petitions could practically issue an own-initiative report on more or less anything and everything. We do not see why this committee should have more rights than the other committees. It will of course retain this right provided that there is no objection by the Conference of Presidents.
The electronic register has been retained. If necessary there will be fact-finding visits in situ to establish facts or indeed to seek a solution. This role is one of mediator; it is something slightly original which we have decided to introduce, and which will be to Parliament’s credit.
If need be, we will ask for the assistance of the Commission, represented this evening at the highest level, to clarify the application of Community law and, possibly, to supply information to us. The information collected will naturally be supplied to the Commission, the Council and the petitioner.
However, what about the Treaty of Lisbon should it be ratified? You will be aware that a new type of petition is provided for by this Treaty – alongside the petitions submitted to the European Parliament which have existed for a very long time – namely petitions submitted to the European Commission, bearing at least one million signatures.
We have simply decided that, in the event that the Lisbon Treaty is ratified, if a related issue is ever raised in a petition submitted by a million citizens to the Commission, we in Parliament would check whether we were dealing with an identical issue and whether or not the petition submitted to the Commission could affect our work, in which case we would simply inform the petitioners.
Well, Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I think I have more or less summed up the situation. There is no revolution then, just some clarifications and the prevention of any possible deadlock.
I am going to talk about petitions. We have seen in the past that the Rules of Procedure, as they stand, have caused us a few problems, as sometimes certain rules were difficult to interpret or even led to political deadlock as to the admissibility of this or that text. We have therefore tried to do some tidying up, to clarify and to consolidate, but that does not make it a revolution.
First of all we want to better identify the petitioner, since, at the moment, when we receive half a tonne of petitions, it is not that clear who the contact person is. We will therefore ask the petitioners to specify who is, as it were, their leader; otherwise, we will decide to use the first name on the first page.
We have established the right to withdraw from a petition. We are saying to the citizens, ‘you can submit a petition but you can also waive this right and request that your name be withdrawn from the list of signatories’.
You are aware that Parliament can receive correspondence in minority languages, such as Galician, Basque, Catalan and so on, when they are recognised by the Member States. We have decided to extend this right to petitions, too. If we receive correspondence in certain languages which the Bureau recognises as languages for written communication with citizens, we shall also reply in those languages.
The true reform, however, lies with admissibility. Until now, the members of the Committee on Petitions at times had to battle quite hard to find out whether a certain document really was a matter of European law or not. After all, since Europe extends to all areas, people were getting in through the back door. We have therefore tried to simplify things by giving a kind of admissibility incentive.
If a quarter of the members of the Committee on Petitions regards a text as admissible, it will be considered, as there is no question of our restricting a vital right, a right which is, in any case, based on primary law. In the event of a declaration of inadmissibility, we shall even try to recommend possible means of redress.
There must always be transparency, since the petitioner’s name and the content of the petition will always be published on our registers, but if, in order to protect privacy, the petitioner asks for anonymity, we will be able to provide this. The same holds true if confidentiality is requested during discussions.
Naturally the petitioners’ right to speak, at the discretion of the committee chairman, has been retained."@en1
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