Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-09-14-Speech-2-017"
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"en.20040914.2.2-017"2
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"Mr President, dear Josep Borrell, my group would also like to congratulate you on your election as President, and we hope you will be a good President for us all, irrespective of where we come from and irrespective of what we think of the draft Constitution.
It is not difficult to foresee the European Parliament approving the Constitution by a large majority. It will give more power and influence to us here in this House. The EU will be able to make decisions in 15 new areas. We shall be given majority decision-making in 40 new areas in which it will be possible for the national parliaments to be voted down. It will be much easier to achieve qualified majorities with the new rules, and the European Parliament will be entitled to table many more amendments to the laws that are to apply in our countries.
The democratic problem is, however, that the national parliaments will lose much more power than the European Parliament will gain. Most of the power will pass from the electorate to 300 working groups in the Council of Ministers and 3 000 in the Commission, none of which operate transparently or are subject to the influence of citizens. Democracy is being restricted in our countries, and the electorate will end up losing out the most.
What is reassuring is that we are now to have referendums in ten countries. Would that this development could also extend to the majority of other countries, the outcome being referendums everywhere. How can power be taken from the electorate without asking them whether they are in favour of shifting influence to officials and ministers with very little feeling for a very distant European Parliament?
We are now debating whether the EU institutions should adopt a special communications strategy to convince the electorate of the Constitution’s merits. The EU institutions have one single task prior to the referendums, and that is to make the draft Constitution available in different languages and reader-friendly editions. This is not something they have been able to do. It is, in actual fact, my office that has published reader-friendly editions on the website www.euabc.com. The Council has only managed to print a number of unreadable versions containing neither indices nor the minority opinion that we in the Convention were expressly promised would be included. The European Parliament could take over the task that the Council and the Commission have not carried out, in spite of their wealth of resources. The various groups’ opinions could be appended to the official texts so that the voters might be provided with different recommendations and the opportunity to adopt positions themselves.
Referendums and constitutions belong neither to governments nor to parliaments, but to the electorate. The voters in our Member States must be given a guarantee that free and fair referendums will be arranged everywhere so that, once the decisions – whether in favour or otherwise - have been made, everyone can say that things were done fairly. The voters have spoken. We respect their decisions."@en1
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