Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-09-04-Speech-1-118"
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"en.20000904.8.1-118"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I have the great honour of presenting, on behalf of the Committee on Development and Cooperation, this report on the liquidation of one of the projects which appears to have been more successful or which has been more positively appreciated in the field of North/South cooperation: the ECIP (
) project. This project is universally considered to have been successful, although, in company with many other projects, it did suffer from the delays which have built up in the external relations sector, delays with which we are all familiar and which Commissioner Patten has recently analysed in great detail. In this case, we have almost 600 projects which were approved in due time and which are to be financed by the ECIP. The Commission has therefore proposed – after a delay which we condemn in our report, caused, of course, by the events of 1999 – to extend, not the legal basis itself, but the existence of the technical assistance offices and the means which are essential for the management of the sizeable remainder of the ECIP – 590 projects – and to do so for two years.
I have to say, Commissioner, that the Committee on Development and Cooperation has been faced with the opinions of the other Parliamentary committees – the Committee on Budgets and the Committee on Budgetary Control – on this matter. As you will have seen, these two committees attempted to fence in the Commission, so to speak, and place greater restrictions on it, calling upon it to conclude the operation six months earlier and to submit progress reports earlier in the process than proposed. We, the Committee on Development and Cooperation, have understood the Commission’s message, the request to assist the ECIP project – which, I repeat, has contributed, along with other projects, to the creation and growth of thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises in Third World countries and has, in effect, raised the profile of the Union and enabled it to penetrate a new sector, which is therefore important to the Commission – and we have therefore decided not to go along with the more restrictive opinions of the other Committees or to make amendments to the Commission’s principal request to be granted two years to bring this major economic cooperation instrument to the best possible conclusion and to honour the agreements, signed before 31 December 1999.
However, at the same time, Commissioner, we have made a request: we have called upon you to inform Parliament of what the Commission intends to be the future of this instrument and to do so in good time for us to be able to reflect on the matter, together if possible. We have seen that it is an effective instrument which has responded to real needs and has employed much more in the way of resources than the Community Budget funding. We therefore call upon you to accept our amendment in order to make the co-decision procedure as rapid as possible and so that, if possible, we will be able to close the procedure in a single reading, so that you will be equipped with the means for action as soon as possible. Our modest request is that you inform us of your intentions before the end of the year.
We are aware of the differences of opinion and the possible conflicts of responsibilities between external relations and development and therefore between the responsibilities of the individual Directorates-General, and possibly even between the responsibilities of the individual Commissioners, but we are also aware that, during restructuring, the responsibility for external relations is extremely carefully reviewed by yourself, in particular, Commissioner, and by the entire Commission. We have not, therefore, laid down a line of march. We have not laid down that the ECIP has to remain an autonomous instrument or that the ECIP can and must be integrated into a wider-reaching instrument. We have merely requested that the faith we are placing in the Commission in granting it these extra two years will be repaid: this is our request, and I would ask you, Commissioner, to tell us now whether you accept the amendments which we have tabled."@en1
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