Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-06-02-Speech-1-071"
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"en.20030602.6.1-071"2
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"Mr President, a Committee chairman can only feel great satisfaction at seeing colleagues congratulate each other, as Mr Rothley and Mr Lehne have done, on work carried out under his guidance. I am genuinely pleased because we have been working on this project for years. In actual fact, when I had the honour of taking on the chairmanship of the committee, I found areas of strong disagreement which it has only been possible to resolve through debate.
As you can see from the speeches, we have worked together harmoniously, never losing sight of two important things: on the one hand, our desire to support the constituent process which is to give shape to a Parliament, its rights, responsibilities and privileges, and, on the other, the fact that the provisions of the Treaty are antiquated and obsolete, as Mr Rothley explained clearly, dating from the sixties, when Parliament was just a consultative assembly.
Mr Rothley’s draft, which we are about to adopt, seeks to lay down a new legal framework for the European Parliament and rules governing the exercising of its mandate. I too want to stress that it really is a Statute for a genuine Parliament, which covers not just the financial side of things and, if I may be so bold as to mention it, remuneration, which were fairly minor issues on which the debate in committee had reached an
but the structure and organisation of Parliament’s function, role, characteristics and mandate as well.
I would like to be able to quote a major point of a report dating from 1986, which was tabled by Mr Georges Donnès, a great liberal. As far back as 15 years ago, this report stressed that the European Parliament was an institution destined to play a crucial role in the Community’s activity and in the process of producing Community documents, and that there could therefore be no opposition to changes deemed to be necessary for the Community bodies. Even then, it was clear that some bodies would have to undergo a process of change.
As regards the possibility of genuinely equal conditions of immunity for all the Members of Parliament, the author of the report wondered whether it would not be possible to define a position of genuine autonomy and immunity for Members of the European Parliament as such, for as long as the current distinction made in Article 10 of the Protocol – which we are now attempting to amend – was preserved.
It can be inferred from the report I have just mentioned that such equal treatment is necessary not just to avoid the negative psychological effects of there being first and second class MEPs, but also because it is the fulfilment, a good sixteen years later, of a dream, a plan: making the Parliamentary institutions independent of other powers through the protection of the individual Members. This protection concerns our work and the image we want to give Europe of MEPs who, after many years, first and foremost after this Parliamentary term, through and under your presidency, are establishing a firm point of reference, which, not least, can only benefit enlargement by giving MEPs the effective role they should have."@en1
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