Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-12-17-Speech-2-171"

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"en.20021217.5.2-171"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, even though the foreign policy of nation states is, by tradition, a matter for the executive, money for certain foreign-policy activities has to be authorised by their parliaments. The right of control over the budget is the traditional means whereby a national parliament exercises parliamentary control over foreign policy, and so we are very glad that this budget enables us to take a further step on the road towards parliamentary control of the common foreign and security policy. An agreement is in place with the Council, which has given an assurance that, prior to future decisions – in particular on joint actions – Parliament, the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Committee on Budgets will be notified at a point in time at which they can still exert some influence on the measure as a whole. We now appeal to the Convention to enshrine this accordingly in the nascent European constitution and to beef it up. Nobody wants to put a question mark against the Member States' right to reach autonomous decisions on foreign policy matters, but if Parliament is expected to make funds available, then it has to be given advance notice. We have seen many examples over the past few years of foreign policy undertakings being given and our budget procedure having to be used to find the money for them by cuts being made somewhere in the budget. As our colleague Mr Bourlanges once put it: ‘The reconstruction of the former Yugoslavia, and of the Balkans, was paid for by Africa, as that is where we had to make cuts to make it possible.’ This agreement with the Council is an important step towards this no longer being the case in future, and towards foreign policy competence bearing some relation to the budget procedure, and we encourage the Convention to take this into account in the work it is doing."@en1

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