Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-05-06-Speech-3-412"
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"en.20090506.41.3-412"2
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"(
) Mr President, Vice-President, ladies and gentlemen, the final evening sitting of this legislative period is devoted to the debate on the Treaty of Lisbon. We know that many evening sittings have preceded this one in our effort to bring about a Reform Treaty and its ratification in 26 parliaments of the Member States.
I should like to express my congratulations and my appreciation to the Members in the Czech Senate, who today supported this Treaty with a clear majority. I would also like to thank all those who helped to remove this obstacle.
Yes, let us applaud the Czech Senate all the way from Strasbourg to Prague. We are very pleased with this outcome.
I am very optimistic that we will be able to complete the ratification procedure towards the end of the year. We must not count our chickens before they are hatched, but everything would seem to indicate that we will get 27 ratifications. The Committee on Constitutional Affairs was therefore right to be optimistic. The European Council, the Commission and the European Parliament must prepare for the entry into force of the Treaty. I am very happy that this House has adopted four eminently interesting and important reports – no, five reports, as Mrs Guy-Quint also presented a report on the financial aspects of the Treaty of Lisbon – as a kind of final act of this legislative period.
I see that this House never gave up on the Reform Treaty, even in difficult times. That is not true of everyone, though. I cannot understand why there was so much hesitation in this House and why so many doubts were expressed as to whether we should still be discussing Lisbon at all. This debate was even hidden in the evening sitting, when it could quite easily have taken place during the daytime. It is beneath the dignity of this House to postpone such a debate to the evening sitting. We know why it happened. They did not want this House to reaffirm its conviction in front of a large audience that we need this Treaty, that we want it and that we believe in it. There were sceptics at the very highest levels of this Parliament, which I find absolutely incomprehensible and totally unacceptable.
I took on the report on Parliament’s role in implementing the Treaty of Lisbon and I can say that this Parliament will be one of the winners under the Reform Treaty. We are taking a quantum leap in democratic control, whether in terms of legislation, or budgetary control and decision-making, or the control and even the election of the executive, of the Commission, or the approval of international agreements, or new rights of initiative that we are granted, the most prominent example being the right of the European Parliament to suggest amendments to the Treaty – a privilege previously reserved to the Member States and their governments. Codecision as standard puts us on an equal footing with the Council of Ministers: agricultural policy, fisheries policy, research policy, structural regulations – much will now lie within the joint responsibility and codecision power of this House. We have new supervisory powers, new rights to information and new powers of initiative.
Vice-President, I thank you for always standing alongside us. Today has been a good day and, with the four reports, as a kind of final act, we close a period full of dedication to reforming the European Union. It is my hope that the final act will be played out with the new Parliament and that we can enter the new legislative period on new, stronger foundations."@en1
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