Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-02-12-Speech-3-017"
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"en.20030212.3.3-017"2
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"Mr President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, the EU Summit is to meet ‘His Imperial Highness’ Giscard d'Estaing, who is in the process of preparing a draft democratic constitution behind closed doors in a Praesidium in which four of Parliament’s seven political groups are not represented. We have sent a complaint to President Giscard d'Estaing and asked to be given the right of access to the documents being used in the course of the Praesidium’s work. We have still not received a reply.
President Giscard d'Estaing has refused another request to scrutinise documentation on the grounds that EU rules on transparency do not apply to him. I should like to call upon the Presidency to inform him politely but firmly that the Praesidium too is funded by EU taxpayers and must of course act in accordance with the judgments of the Court of Justice and the principle of transparency, which now appears in Article 255 of the Treaty.
There is no exemption for President Giscard d'Estaing and no legal base for representatives of the Commission, Parliament and the Council being able to depart from the principle of transparency unless they are provided with a special legal base by the regulation on transparency or decline to make a document available after making a practical assessment of it. In the case of every single document in the Praesidium’s possession, President Giscard d'Estaing must weigh up its significance in the negotiations against the public’s interest in knowing about it and, like everyone else in the EU, he must ensure that the principle of equality is practised.
The situation must not arise in which three political groups have documents from the Praesidium available to them that are not available to the other four groups, or in which Convention documents circulate among foreign ministry interns that have not also been made available to members of the Convention. We demand equality – neither more, nor less.
The word ‘constitution’ appears 32 times in the first 16 articles. It must now be clear even to those least quick on the uptake that a constitution, and not merely a constitutional treaty, is being worked on.
I should like to call for the Praesidium to be reconstituted and made more representative of EU citizens. All the political groups should be represented. Women, who constitute half the electorate, cannot be satisfied with two places; the 13 candidate countries cannot be satisfied with one observer; and there cannot continue to be no representatives of that half of the electorate who voted no in the referendums on the EU held in the few countries that allow people to vote. Thank you, Mr President, even though there is not very much to say thank you for."@en1
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