Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-12-03-Speech-3-036"
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"en.20031203.6.3-036"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, let me start by associating myself with Mr Watson’s determined protest against the grave and ongoing violations of human rights in the USA’s prison camps.
Let me now turn to the Intergovernmental Conference. I ask myself why in fact the governments summoned a Convention, when, even without one, they could still have had the age-old spectacle of the nations haggling over their interests. While the governments are turning the Convention draft inside out, we in this House have gone back to drafting resolutions, repeating ourselves, protesting against the eternal sameness of things, but to no avail, with neither a response nor even a serious debate to show for it. The question we should be asking ourselves is what we should be doing. The governments think they know what our response is going to be; we gave it to them after the partial failure of Amsterdam. It was, ‘this is better than nothing.’ Then, after Nice, where the failure was complete, we gave it to them again: ‘this is better than nothing.’ Now I have come to believe that a bad constitution is not better than nothing. We should make it plain to the governments that it is not they who are the masters of the treaties, but the parliaments and the people they represent, and that it is these who can bring this constitution down.
We are then told in tones full of emotion that the dignity of every single Member State must be safeguarded. What about Europe’s dignity? Nobody said a word about that. I cannot imagine that the dignity of any single Member State demands that the principles of the separation of the powers and of the public nature of lawmaking be violated, or that the legislative council – the Convention’s big idea for greater democracy – be done away with. I cannot imagine that the dignity of a Member State demands that the undoubted legitimacy of dual majority be traded for the lottery of Nice. I cannot imagine that the dignity of a Member State means that more laws have to be passed in Council, or that more offences against parliamentarianism and the public nature of lawmaking are called for. That has nothing whatever to do with national dignity, which does not require an attack on Parliament’s budgetary rights.
In the last debate, and in the corridors and behind the scenes, I have heard people calling for compromise. To hear Mr Méndez de Vigo speak about it, you would think it was about this House renouncing its loyalty to the Convention and setting out on the treacherous ice of compromise. We are offered compromises only when we are in retreat. We are offered negotiations only when democracy and the rights of Parliament are disputed. Nobody seems to me to be offering to negotiate concerning our demands over and above the Intergovernmental Conference. This time, we should make it plain that a bad constitution is not better than nothing."@en1
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