Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-12-12-Speech-2-117"
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"en.20001212.6.2-117"2
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"Mr President, after the Single European Act, after Maastricht, after the Treaty of Amsterdam, this Parliament had to judge the results. In all those cases we reached the conclusion that those treaties were not entirely satisfactory, did not respond to all of our aspirations, but nonetheless represented a step forward and were at least better than the status quo. We recommended that they be ratified.
This time we have a treaty which, at least on one point, represents a step backwards and is arguably worse than the status quo: that is, the new system for qualified majority voting in the Council, which makes reaching a decision even more difficult than it is at present. It introduces a triple threshold: number of states, population, and the percentage of the votes set at a higher level than is the case at the moment. At the moment it is 71% of the votes. That is already very high. It was set high to make sure that under any permutation such a qualified majority represented a majority of the population. Now that we have a population criterion in there anyway, it should have been possible to lower the threshold in terms of the number of votes. Instead it seems that it has been raised, although I speak while waiting to see the final text: apparently there was an adjustment in the last hour of the IGC on that. I will evaluate that outcome when I see the text. Nonetheless that is a very worrying situation.
For the rest the Treaty is a mixture of unsatisfactory and positive things – unsatisfactory but nonetheless better than the status quo, I suppose, at least as regards the extension of qualified majority voting, the extension of the codecision procedure for the European Parliament, and the provisions for enhanced cooperation. That is all better than we have now, even if not all of our requests and desires have been met.
Finally, there are a few positive things: the new version of Article 7 of the Treaty; the article on political parties and their statute; the right of this Parliament to take the other institutions to the Court of Justice – that is also an important factor of political control; the new formula for the European Commission, putting the so-called "lex Prodi" into the Treaty, strengthening the President and the new composition of the Commission – a reasonable compromise which I accept and will work over time; and, as my colleague, Mr Tsatsos pointed out, the way forward to the future. This is not the end of the story. New reforms will come and we must take advantage of that.
To sum up, we have a mixture of the good, the bad and the ugly. We will now evaluate this in detail. I believe we will recommend ratification and moving forward to a new reform, but we must look at the small print to decide whether that is the right way forward."@en1
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