Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-12-17-Speech-1-088"
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"en.20011217.3.1-088"2
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"Mr President, we can celebrate today a number of victories for the European Parliament on things which, not very long ago, we were told would never possibly be agreed at the Laeken European Council.
For a start we have a Convention – and I am particularly pleased at this because I think I was the first one to suggest nearly two years ago now, that the Convention method that was used for drafting the Charter of Rights could equally be used to prepare a revision of the Treaties. We were told that it would be restricted to just four subjects and now it is clear that the agenda is wide open. It will produce a single document with recommendations, not just listing every single option that anybody can think of. It will of course come up with options when there is a division, but it will work towards reaching a broad consensus as the basis for the work of the IGC. On all that we can be pleased.
The fly in the ointment is the curious decision on the choice of the troika for the praesidium of this Convention. It is no secret that my group would not have chosen Mr Giscard d’Estaing as its preferred candidate, but as you know, Mr President, we have had experiences of constitutional reports from Mr Giscard d’Estaing in this Parliament. He produced a report on subsidiarity a number of years ago and from that we can draw some lessons because every single paragraph in his report, if I remember correctly, was amended in committee and then in plenary, by Parliament adopting amendments tabled by yourself. That might be a working method we might well need to employ in the Convention and is something we can draw some lessons from.
I turn now to the less positive result of the European Council – the farce over the agencies. That too can be used to learn some lessons. It shows us what happens when we move away from the Community method to intergovernmentalism. Instead of a Commission proposal we have every country coming up with its own proposal, feeling forced to defend it in an intergovernmental logic and with no result in the end. It shows the limits of the European Council which should be setting the strategic objectives for the European Union. When it has to deal with detail like that it of course fails. Let no government now turn around to the Parliament and criticise us for being incapable of taking decisions, accuse us of being too slow in taking decisions, when the European Council offers us a spectacle like that, which indeed discredits the European Union in the eyes of its citizens.
Mr President, I shall stop now but not without remarking that I believe this is the last time you will chairing the European Parliament before the presidential election comes and you move on to other higher things and may I wish you all the best of luck for a prosperous and successful New Year in 2002."@en1
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