Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-05-05-Speech-3-368"

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"en.20100505.72.3-368"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, we have a broad consensus on this matter. We look forward to the enlargement of Parliament and we look forward to 18 new Members. We want to create the conditions for this now so that they can come and work together with us. There is only one small difference of opinion, which in truth is actually very large, because it concerns the basis of our work, including our understanding of the principle of democracy and our appreciation of this House itself. It concerns the question of who decides who these new Members will be. For us, that is not a secondary issue, it is a key question. According to the Treaty, Members of the European Parliament ‘shall be elected for a term of five years by direct universal suffrage in a free and secret ballot’. It is the citizens who do the electing. In 11 out of 12 countries that is what has happened. One country is now saying that that is not possible and that they will send us MEPs who were elected by their citizens for a totally different job. We do not consider that to be a satisfactory way to treat Parliament or the right of the citizens to vote and the principle of democracy. We could dispense with a convention if this were merely a technical issue, in other words if we had agreed on the principle of compliance with the Treaties. However, at this point the Treaty is at risk of collapsing. Let us insist on the convening of a convention, which is a wonderful method of achieving consensus outside of the level of governments in Europe on precisely these types of questions."@en1
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