Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-04-11-Speech-2-061"
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"en.20000411.3.2-061"2
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"Mr President, as the Commission is well aware, I am not accustomed to being an easy-going, meek or lenient speaker when it comes to the Commission in its role as executive. I am therefore all the more at home today in expressing the concerns I have due to the discharge procedure which is being carried out.
I do not wish to challenge the compromise which appears in the resolution negotiated between the political groups and the rapporteur. This compromise has three distinct advantages over the rapporteur’s initial draft. Firstly, it no longer uses the vehement and aggressive tone of the initial draft report, a tone which I do not find, as I might say in the style of Kenneth Starr, worthy of this House, being rather more suited to the tabloid press, and one which should not in any case be used to characterise relations between a responsible institution, such as our own, and a Commission in which we expressed our confidence but a few months ago. In this respect, the report has been improved.
Secondly, this report ceases to indulge in the unjustified implication of officials who may have taken more or less appropriate decisions but who do not in any way deserve to be exposed to public condemnation and pilloried in a procedure which is not subject to judicial process.
Thirdly, this report asks the Commission questions which it can answer within reasonable time limits, enabling us to vote upon discharge within the time limits stipulated by the Treaty. These are the three positive features.
There are, however, three forms of sidelong shift which give me pause. The first is that we are forgetting what the discharge procedure consists of. We must remember that discharge involves, and must only involve, accepting the financial statements for the year and ensuring that expenditure is in order, and does not involve digging out again and again the skeletons which have been hidden away for years in the cupboards of the various institutions. It is paradoxical, and even unfair, that the report in question makes so little mention of the financial year 1998.
The second shift in emphasis involves the failure to make it clear that the explanatory statement is distinct from the report. On the one hand, we have a dispassionate and objective report, undoubtedly insistent, but legitimately so, and on the other hand, we have an explanatory statement which, even though it represents only the opinion of the rapporteur, nonetheless is a godsend to the press. How many journalists are aware that the resolution represents the opinion of the House but that the explanatory statement represents only the opinion of the rapporteur? This gives us grounds for concern.
The third and final anomaly is the gap between Parliament’s handling of its own problems and Parliament’s handling of other people’s problems. We cannot adopt a sliding scale for measuring correct behaviour, and we are taking a major political risk if we are more indulgent towards ourselves than towards others.
Mr President, thank you for letting me conclude. I should just like to mention the maxim that the police always catch serial killers as soon as they step up the rate of their killing. We brought the Commission down a year ago, and we had better not give in to our homicidal impulses again."@en1
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