Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-10-08-Speech-3-085"
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"en.20031008.8.3-085"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, one theme of our joint debate today is a very important one, the quality of European lawmaking. One improvement to it is to be in the form of an institutional agreement between the three institutions; as for the other, the Commission, starting with the White Paper ‘European Governance’ at the end of 2001, has produced to date no fewer than sixteen comprehensive documents in the form of communications and reports on ‘European Governance and better lawmaking’.
Some of these documents constitute a sort of undertaking on the part of the Commission in respect of its own work, and that is laudable. Others touch directly on Parliament’s rights as laid down in the Treaties, such as, for example, the exercise of the implementing powers conferred on the Commission, termed comitology procedures, or statements on the creation of new legal instruments, such as, for example, open coordination, self-regulation, co-regulation and similar. The new interinstitutional agreement is meant to be a sort of undertaking on the part of the three institutions to lay down the use of these instruments, which has never before been specified in any of the Treaties.
Although our counterparts have done important work, and despite my gratitude to them for doing so and thus enabling themselves to really get to grips with these issues, I have to say that I am less happy about our entering into another obligation, as anyone reading the text of this interinstitutional agreement could only wonder what added value would thereby accrue to Parliament over and above its rights as laid down in the Treaties. I do not think that will amount to very much; worse still, by signing up to this agreement only a few days after the ceremonial opening of the IGC, which will also deal with this topic, and without being constrained to do so, we in this House are binding ourselves in chains and, indeed, renouncing the full use of the parliamentary prerogatives that it has taken two laborious decades to secure for ourselves.
The only way Parliament has, in the past, been able to progressively extend its influence in the teeth of the Commission and the Council has been by making the utmost use of the rights accorded it by the Treaties. By signing up to interinstitutional agreements of this sort and concluding agreements with the Commission, as we did with the Lamfalussy procedure, we are ourselves again curtailing our own rights, thus, as I see it, putting everything completely the wrong way around.
The quality of European lawmaking is so important an issue that we should not treat it lightly. Those on the receiving end – by which I mean the public to whom legislation applies, the Member States, which have to transpose it and all involved in implementing it at every level – suffer when laws are bad, and so we should stop churning out loads of paper through all the institutions and instead put it to the test by submitting and enacting laws that really are better. That is in our hands as Members of this House.
Today, the eighth day of October, sees this House, by means of the Medina Ortega report, making a second attempt at stating its position on a Commission communication on simplified and improved regulation dating back to December 2001, since which date, three summit meetings of Heads of State or Government have given their attention to the issue without Parliament having been in a position to respond and thereby make its influence felt. Producing more paper in this way sets a bad example, when we should, instead, be supporting the Commission in reducing the amount of EU legislation, which now amounts to some 97 000 pages, and in cleaning it all up. That, too, would help the quality of European legislation."@en1
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