Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-03-13-Speech-3-191"
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"en.20020313.7.3-191"2
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".
Mr President, the Presidency-in-Office of the Council has listened very carefully to all the speeches made during this debate and we have taken very good note of the positions expressed.
As the Foreign Minister has already stated in his introductory speech as President-in-Office of the Council, our commercial policy is a common one, and the European Commission has full autonomy and authority to make whatever decisions are appropriate. Accordingly, I believe the Commission has, on behalf of the European Union, taken a firm stand on the steel problem, a stand that was publicly expressed and unanimously adopted by the Council of Ministers last Monday.
I therefore believe we must trust the Commission’s ability – as I have said – to deal with this matter, protest as appropriate, call for suitable compensation and use retaliatory measures, while fully complying with World Trade Organisation rules. The Presidency-in-Office of the Council believes that our most powerful option is to call on the United States to comply with the rules that all the founders of the World Trade Organisation have set for themselves. It is therefore very important that the European Union should set the example that we are the first to comply with not only the procedures but also the rules of the World Trade Organisation.
The clementine issue has also been mentioned – another trade issue with the United States that has yet to be resolved. In this respect, the Presidency-in-Office can only say that it is up to the Member State affected – in this case Spain – to submit its claim to the Article 133 Committee and the Commission will act in accordance with what the Committee decides. Everything seems to indicate that the measures adopted are disproportionate to the alleged threat from the so-called Mediterranean fly, which has been the argument used by the United States to ban the import of clementines. These points will be assessed by the Article 133 Committee, which deals with such matters, and the Commission will be given a mandate to act accordingly.
With regard to other considerations that have been expressed here on the United States’ lamentable tendency to act unilaterally in many areas, not only in these matters of trade policy but also in other matters of general policy, the Presidency can only agree with many of the positions expressed here. I therefore believe that the forthcoming EU-US Summit to be held in Washington on 2 May will be a good opportunity for the Presidency of the Council and the Presidency of the Commission to remind the United States’ President that the spirit of the Transatlantic Declaration, which, as has been mentioned, was signed in 1995, binds the parties to maintain a spirit of cooperation, to seek common ground and not to seek ground that separates us and, in the fine tradition of the intense relationship between the United States and Europe, it is in the interests of both parties, the United States and Europe, to seek points of agreement and not of disagreement. Positions that separate the United States not only from the European Union but also from the general current of international opinion are, of course, not at all helpful in finding points of agreement.
I believe this debate has been highly fruitful; we shall incorporate many of the opinions we have heard here into the general corpus on which we shall reflect in order to prepare the forthcoming transatlantic summit, and so I should like to thank you, Mr President, and this Parliament for all the ideas that have been put forward in this debate."@en1
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