Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-11-17-Speech-3-212"
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"en.19991117.7.3-212"2
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"Mr President, the Committee on Constitutional Affairs has discussed this report thoroughly at several meetings, and I believe we are presenting plenum with a report of substance concerning the reform of the Treaties. I have my colleague, Mr Dimitrakopoulos, to thank for collaborating so well and for distributing the work in such a way that this extensive task could be carried out. We are agreed that, before the European Union is enlarged to include new States, there must be a basic reform to maintain the efficiency of the European Union and also, I would say, to improve the transparency of decisions on European policy and the ability to supervise these.
We in Parliament urge that the reform now pending should go above and beyond the three Amsterdam left-overs. True, these are important, but they are not enough. I want to mention five points in connection with which demands are being made in my part of our report.
Firstly: we demand the reform of all institutions and of all organisations including, therefore, the Court of Justice, the Court of Auditors, the Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions. All these institutions must be subjected to scrutiny. Central to all this is the reform of the Council. Parallel to the Intergovernmental Conference, the Council of Ministers must carry out an internal reform, as demanded in the Trumpf-Piris paper, and the essence of the reform must be to have majority voting in the Council as the rule and, as a concomitant of this, to have codecision making by this Parliament in the case of all legislative acts. I believe that Parliament will judge the Intergovernmental Conference according to whether this reform of the Council is successful.
Secondly: the Intergovernmental Conference must make a contribution to the democratic supervision of European politics. Parliament must have better opportunities to supervise the Commission and to hold it to account. In this connection, we demand that the President of the Commission should have the ability to ask this Parliament for a vote of confidence and that the so-called Prodi procedure, whereby the President is able to dismiss a single Member of the Commission, should be incorporated into the next Treaty.
Thirdly: we think that the reorganisation of the Treaties, leading to a situation in which the European Union would have something akin to a constitution, has now become a matter of importance. No citizen, and no expert either, understands the Treaties as they stand at present. They are unreadable. If we are to remain close to our citizens, we need to have the Treaties combined into a single text and divided into two parts – a constitutional part, and a second part which would then also partly have to be subjected to a simplified revision procedure.
Fourthly: reform of the Treaties requires not only that these should be ambitious in content but also that a new method of reform should be employed. Negotiating behind closed doors should be a thing of the past. Nor is it any longer acceptable. Parliament must be involved in all phases of preparing for, and holding, the Intergovernmental Conference. We request that the Community method as per Article 48 be used; we expect a concrete proposal from the Commission which will form the basis for the negotiations; and we also expect to reach a consensus with the Council and the Commission concerning the agenda and the procedure for the next Intergovernmental Conference.
This Article 48 itself belongs on the agenda for the Intergovernmental Conference. We think that account must be taken of the European Union’s double legitimacy as a Union of States, on the one hand, but also as a Union of the Peoples on the other, while Parliament obtains the right, when it comes to future negotiations for the purpose of revising the Treaties, to participate in decision making whenever it is the content of the future Treaties which is being negotiated.
We here in Parliament are prepared to collaborate on a comprehensive reform of the Treaties and to ensure that, even following enlargement, our European Union is still able to take necessary decisions and, at the same time, also remain transparent to our citizens so that the latter understand this Union and also accept it.
The Commission presented its proposals last week, and now Parliament is doing the same this week. A lot of colleagues wanted to go much further, to the point of demanding that a European constitution be drafted. We have imposed a discipline upon ourselves and remained within the broad framework of what has been demanded in terms of institutional changes. Now, it is up to the governments, meeting in Helsinki, to have the insight and also the courage to decide upon an agenda whose subject is that of sound reform."@en1
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