Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-11-12-Speech-1-060"
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"en.20011112.5.1-060"2
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"Mr President, what is transparency? Transparency is guaranteed, or so one might and should argue, when as many of the European institutions' documents as possible are made accessible to all citizens of the EU with an interest in them and also when meetings of the Council are guaranteed to be open to the public. It is to this banal sentence that we can reduce the foundation document of the European Transparency Initiative, called into being by a very wide range of parliamentarians and people in public life across Europe and only now beginning to become effective on the basis of Regulation 1049/2001 and the adjustments which we in this Parliament are now making to it.
There are still different conceptions of what we want transparency to be like. I, myself, want the European transparency formula to be an American-Swedish hybrid, with unlimited access to almost everything, with not even a registry, and with a real possibility of watching over and permanently examining what we do in Parliament, and especially what is done in the Council, where the really important decisions are taken. This Parliament does not yet, unfortunately, have the majority required for this. It can be argued that the European public, in all its diversity, is far from ready. There is also room for the argument that, if an Italian or Austrian citizen writes to one of the EU institutions, and his letter is promptly recorded in a public registry, he would certainly not have reckoned with that and might react differently from a Swede, who would treat it as a matter of course.
I think we must, in any case, carry on along this road, especially now that events around the world make the definition of European values an issue. Transparency is definitely one of them. What we now have in front of us is a step in this direction. Mention has already been made of the deliberations in the Committee on Constitutional Affairs. I would like the Greens to come up with a substantially clearer explanation of Amendment No 15 than has been produced to date. I would personally have no problem whatever with the production of necessary documents in the context of budgetary control, or indeed with what is demanded at the end. But if it only scores an own goal, it would be better to leave it out.
Mr Cashman has already said all that needs to be said about Amendment No 17. Amendment No 14 meets with our group's undivided approval. It represents an improvement. Even the deletion of the restriction to ‘permanent’ committees in the first part of Amendment No 15 is only to be welcomed. We must all be aware that there can be no democracy without transparency. We still have plenty of work to do before that is achieved."@en1
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