Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-04-21-Speech-3-325"
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"en.20040421.13.3-325"2
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"Mr President, the bad news for the Commission and Council is that I expect to be back in the next Parliament and I am the rapporteur for the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Human Rights, Common Security and Defence Policy on the regulation covering third countries.
It is quite clear that the Committee on Development and Cooperation is content with the operations under the European initiative for democracy and human rights and it is understandable that two-thirds of the money should now be released for next year. I am sure Mr Nielson is pleased about that. On the other hand, the Foreign Affairs Committee, which actually began this programme some twelve years ago - it was 1992 not 1994 and I was the original rapporteur - is not content. Its members have agreed that we should withdraw my report, which should have been debated today, to allow us time to put more pressure on the Commission and Council over the coming weeks to agree to two very simple requests.
The first request is that an advisory committee should be set up – outside comitology, composed of representatives of Parliament and the Commission and probably chaired by the High Representative – to deal with this fundamentally sensitive programme, which should not necessarily involve the developing countries but rather the countries nearer to us - the 'new neighbourhood' as it is now described.
The second request is that an independent study be conducted, and I await a serious offer from the Commission on this, not just 'we have an open mind'. The Commission does not have an open mind. It wants to keep the entire programme to itself. However, there is a better way of delivery, as is shown by the Americans, the Danes, the Germans, the Dutch, the Swedish and the British, and that is to have a separate foundation that is reliable, flexible and expert to assist the Commission in the delivery of the programme. That is our position and we look forward to some proper reaction from the Commission and Council to these suggestions in due course.
The Commissioner said that this result was welcome and in everybody's interest. Is he talking about the hundreds of millions of people who live in the new neighbourhood, from Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine, through the Caucuses and down through the arc of instability across North Africa to Morocco, into the Arab world? Two hundred and eighty million Arabs live without democracy. Is he proud of that?
I now have to address my remarks to the Press because we have an election coming up and in today's
I write that 'Europe's power risks being so soft that it can hardly be felt by the people to whom it is addressed'. Unfortunately, this welcome programme, brilliantly implemented in the former-Soviet bloc, is totally ineffective in today's world. It is the Commission's responsibility to make it effective and I intend to press very hard to ensure that it does."@en1
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