Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-10-20-Speech-1-248"
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"en.20081020.22.1-248"2
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"Mr President, I am presenting an own-initiative report on ‘Better lawmaking 2006’ pursuant to Article 9 of the Protocol on the application of the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality.
The report is rather wide-ranging so I should like to concentrate on two or three aspects. The first aspect is the importance of the legislative process within the European Union. There seems to be a gradual drift towards adopting what is termed ‘soft law’, whereby certain communications, reports or documents come to be regarded as binding legal rules. The concern expressed in my report is for a clear distinction to be made between simple guidelines issued by administrative institutions and the legislative process.
The legislative process, involving regulations and directives, is currently fully provided for by the Treaties of the European Union and requires an initiative from the Commission which must be approved either by the Council on its own or by the Council in a codecision procedure with Parliament.
In this respect, I believe it is vital to stress the importance of this legislative character, because it is this which takes account of the public interest through the submission of petitions to the bodies having legislative power.
There is a danger, and another potential deviation, in allowing certain bodies or certain sectors to self-regulate. This may be appropriate, for example, for certain associations, professional bodies, corporate bodies and so on but, in my opinion, allowing a given sector to self-regulate is a very serious error. We have recently witnessed the results of deregulation in the United States, which allowed the financial sector to self-regulate, with extremely serious consequences for the whole world economy. In other words, regulation cannot be left in the hands of those who are subject to regulation. Self-regulation is a contradiction in terms and is only appropriate where internal bodies regulate themselves. It should not be considered that a given sector can regulate itself through a system of self-regulation and the same can be said for coregulation.
As far as the European Parliament is concerned, the essential requirement is to establish clear legislative procedures. In other words, Commission proposals must be discussed in Parliament and in the Council and legislative resolutions must be adopted.
The second aspect is the increasing complexity of EU law and the difficulty encountered by the ordinary citizen, including experts in EU law, in understanding what is actually happening. We must make it easier to understand EU law and the only way to do this is through codification, recasting or something similar. We cannot continue developing legal rules as and when necessary and then forget what we have adopted.
It is true that, in recent years, improvements have been made in this respect as, through Parliament, the Commission and the Council working together, the comitology procedures, for example, have been amended. However, in this era of IT, we should ideally have an automatic codification procedure in which any new legal rule adopted is immediately recognised and consolidated through codification procedures.
The report insists on periodic codification. In my opinion, this should be virtually automatic so that, as we adopt legal rules, these are incorporated within the corpus of EU law to form the new EU code. I am not proposing a kind of Napoleonic code with regard to EU law, but rather permanent codification, which I feel will not be difficult, as I said before, in this era of IT."@en1
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