Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-12-17-Speech-2-150"
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"en.20021217.5.2-150"2
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"Mr President, the grand total for next year’s budget compared to Member States’ GNP is a record low. Our group is worried about the low level of payment appropriations. It is feared they do not correspond to the commitments made earlier and that there will be new RALs as a result, which is to say, unpaid appropriations will pile up. It is feared that, on account of a new rule, a ‘sunset clause’, Member States will lose the payments they are due. The problem has been mainly only theoretical while the Commission has not forwarded appropriations in the budget for payment and while Member States have been able to get back billions of euros of unused own resources, or contributions. If next year payment appropriations do not meet payment needs, the sunset clause will cause a new kind of problem.
Our group would like to focus on the interinstitutional agreement the previous Parliament made on our behalf. New needs have come into being, especially under headings 3 and 4, which cannot be covered by the current maximum amounts. Nobody could have predicted in May 1999 that there would be a need for reconstruction in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan in a situation in which the EU seems to have committed itself to the economic alleviation of the consequences of a US policy of aggression. The share of responsibility would seem to be one where the USA does the attacking and the EU pays for the clean-up operation and reconstruction in the aftermath of war. A new Iraq war might increase the pressure on next year’s foreign aid programme, so there are no margins under that heading for initiating new actions.
In the opinion of our group the ceilings in the interinstitutional agreement should be re-estimated. Let us please make this stupid Stability and Growth Pact more flexible. The budget has a special flexible instrument, but it would appear that the Council misuses it for payments that can be predicted instead. The failure of the Moroccan fishing agreement was not an unforeseeable piece of expenditure for which the flexible instrument was really needed. The breaking-up of the Spanish and Portuguese fishing fleets should have been totally financed next year in some way other than partially by means of the flexible instrument.
Our group thinks a positive step has been taken in commencing serious discussions about reducing the transportation of live animals for slaughter and calling into question the treatment of animals in the primate research centre at Rijswijk in Holland. We are, however, critical of the fact that the ball has been set rolling for the EU budget to be used to finance the common foreign and security policy. This time round we will be financing civil crisis management: next time it will perhaps be war. It has not become clear to me during the debate on the budget how it is intended to organise the auditing of funds that are the Council’s responsibility nor how nor to whom discharge is to be granted in respect of the use of these funds. Perhaps the Commissioner knows."@en1
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