Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-04-09-Speech-3-020"
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"en.20030409.3.3-020"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, we managed at the very last minute to reach a compromise on the adjustment of the Financial Perspective for 2004-2006 and thus to guarantee our ability, today, to do justice to our historic responsibility whilst at the same time defending this House's budgetary powers and rights of codecision.
We also have to clarify again that, in the 2004 Budget procedure, which will now surely run its course in an orderly way, the issue of adjusting the Financial Perspective can be resolved without any sort of discrimination, in sub-headings or by means of capping, against the new Member States.
In a most difficult process, and on the basis of necessary repair work, we have managed to defend all of Parliament's budgetary powers and rights of codecision, while, at the same time, at the end of this difficult process – even though it was almost a dead end – the European institutions have again been able to demonstrate their capacity to act. This sends a positive message to the candidate countries and to the citizens of Europe.
As the Committee on Budgets' rapporteur on the financial arrangements for enlargement, I want again to make it clear that these difficult negotiations have never been about calling into question the Copenhagen agreements with the candidate countries, but about treating them as a minimum to be guaranteed also by us. So let me say again, loud and clear, that we, the European Parliament, in our previous resolutions – for example in June and September of last year – have, again and again, lent massive support to certain proposals by the Commission, for example the candidate countries' progressive integration into the common agricultural policy, and, for another example, the special cohesion rules for them.
The fact is that we have managed, at the very last minute, to avert an interinstitutional crisis, one into which the Council had manoeuvred us either deliberately or by negligence, by its intention that Annex XV should be given the status of EU primary law. It would surely not have done them any harm to keep on negotiating, right up to second reading, on the adjustment of the Financial Perspective, or even, if necessary, to go back to Article 272 of the Treaty, but many people out there might have taken this to be the wrong signal.
The compromise before us has been brought about, after a fifth trialogue, by the use of what I have to call legal artifice, and by renovation and repair in a process that we are unable to properly explain to anyone out there. I might add that this is evidence of how necessary it is to reform the way the institutions act in relation to each other. Commissioner Schreyer, I would like to state openly that you, on Monday evening, made an important contribution on behalf of the Commission, when your great perseverance helped to make this result possible.
I would also like to express my thanks to the Greek Presidency of the Council, which, as what one might call the hostage of the Council's negotiating mandate, did everything humanly possible to the very end of a difficult process, making it possible for us to come to an arrangement. One thing, though, will be apparent from Mr Brok's resolution, and that is that if even one word of the joint statement is called into question or broken, then the Interinstitutional Agreement, too, lapses and is broken.
We have found a way whereby it is made clear in specific terms that the adjustment of the Financial Perspective on the basis of item 25 of the Interinstitutional Agreement is being carried out on a proposal from the Commission and jointly with the Council and with Parliament. We have secured for ourselves in Heading 3 on internal policy the necessary leeway for the codecision procedures that have to be seen through in the course of this year – in programmes with added value for Europe, programmes that are important to the public, such as research, Erasmus, Youth for Europe – so that we can then complete codecision in a proper procedure with the supplementary sum of EUR 480 million at 1999 prices.
We also saw it as important to make clear that if, by way of a de facto revision of financial aid for Turkey, sums are transferred from Heading 4 to Heading 7, that heading must in future be entitled
. What has been made clear is that there are here, so to speak, two groups of countries – Bulgaria and Romania with pre-accession aid on the one hand, and aid for Turkey as a candidate country on the other."@en1
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"Pre-Accession Strategy"1
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