Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-03-26-Speech-3-103"
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"en.20030326.6.3-103"2
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"Mr President, I am still not quite clear as to whether the problems we are having are caused by an enormous blunder on the part of the Council or whether this is part of a clever strategy. Either way, neither of the two options is particularly attractive; let us suppose that the Council just stupidly forgot that the Interinstitutional Agreement in Article 25 specifies that the Council and Parliament must take decisions on changes to the financial perspectives on account of enlargement together. Let us suppose that it simply did not know that ignoring this article violates the agreement on loyal cooperation between the Council and Parliament and therefore blows it out of the water. The problem we are then faced with is that the understanding of Parliament’s role and its budget rights has apparently not filtered through into all layers and the fabric of the Council. It is a blessing in disguise, however, that this problem is easy to solve, because once it realises that, the Council can simply obtain the amounts from the Treaties. It is, however, more likely that the Council was perfectly well aware of this all along but was gambling on the fact that Parliament would not demand its rights, since delaying the ratification of the enlargement is a nuclear option for which very few Members of Parliament would be keen to take responsibility.
Parliament is not, however, prepared to proceed to the agenda without further ado, and so the Council is now willing to negotiate on texts; however, these texts will not make the problem go away because the Council wants to keep the amounts in the Treaties unchanged, which in fact violates Parliament’s rights. Yet it is prepared to state that this resolution leaves Parliament’s rights intact. What nonsense is this? I agree with Mr Wynn; I can only conclude from this that the Council is offering to ignore the Treaties in future, a kind of Dutch toleration policy. Drugs are banned under criminal law, but the government and parliament have agreed to tolerate their use. And that is how it will be in the Treaties. The amounts will be prescribed but in practice things will turn out differently if the Council and Parliament agree to that.
I would, however, now like to ask my fellow Members how likely it is that the Council will comply with such a statement loyally and in good faith by 2006. I do not have much faith in that. Anyway, my group regards this action as an infringement of the Interinstitutional Agreement, and we will therefore not hesitate, if necessary, to make full use of our rights under Article 272 in the next Budget procedure.
Although the Dutch policy of tolerance is at least pragmatic, this proposal by the Council is also completely absurd in practice, since it is impossible to govern with amounts written in stone. Supposing there were to be an accident at a nuclear power station, such as that at Temelin in the Czech Republic? Would we first have to have a Treaty Amendment with ratification before we could earmark additional funds? I think that even the Council would have to admit that it would not like to suffer a self-inflicted injury."@en1
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