Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-10-21-Speech-1-069"
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"en.20021021.6.1-069"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen. Essentially, the debate we are having today might appear to be merely technical: what status will the Charter have in the constitution that will come out of the Convention?
This debate poses a question that is absolutely essential from a political standpoint: what are we to do about the debate on citizenship within this Convention? Fortunately, our Charter does not simply address citizenship, but also represents, for our fellow citizens, an essential reference point, and from the beginning of this process, we have said that the Convention must aim for a more democratic, more comprehensible, more transparent Europe.
What our fellow citizens are asking is to be able to feel that they are European citizens. It seems to me that the tool currently available to us to make citizenship come alive is the Charter. So let us incorporate it. Parliament has already requested this many times, and will do so again in voting for Mr Duff’s Report. I believe this is a prerequisite for the work of the Convention to be accepted.
The question is knowing how to incorporate it. My concern, personally, is that this incorporation would confer first-rung status on the Charter in the hierarchy of European texts. This basically means that when one sector or another needs to lay down provisions in its field, it must respect the spirit and the letter of the Charter.
The question of a revision therefore arises, and we know that this is a debate that has caused much concern, including when the work of the previous Convention was concluded.
Like most of us here, I believe that the current Convention does not have the authority to re-open this text, and I also believe that this would be politically inappropriate. The main thing is to check how this revision could take place, because there is no reason to imagine that these texts are written in stone. We ourselves, in drawing up this Charter, took a few liberties with the text of the European Convention on Human Rights, due to the need to adapt and modernise it. Let us imagine that our successors might also need to adapt the text: this would have to take place in the same conditions in which we ourselves wrote this text. Basically, the Charter could only be revised according to the most restrictive rules proposed by the Convention.
My group and I have tabled an amendment to this end and I hope that Parliament will be able to adopt it when voting on Mr Duff’s Report.
I shall end with two brief comments. First, I am anxious to know whether the debate – which is theoretically technical – on the so-called ‘horizontal’ clauses runs the risk of limiting the scope of the Charter. This should be our common approach: no reduction of the Charter’s scope. Lastly, of course, I would like to express my support of the European Union’s signing up to the European Convention on Human Rights, on my own behalf and on behalf of my group. In this way we will have a complete set of measures to protect the rights of our citizens and our residents."@en1
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