Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-02-18-Speech-3-250"
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"en.20090218.24.3-250"2
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"− Mr President, first of all, I would like to confirm the undertaking I gave, on behalf of the Commission, to carry out the mid-term review of the financial instruments in 2009. This was in response to Parliament’s request during the final negotiations on the instruments.
Given that we want to cover known ODA activities, it seems likely that Article 181a of the Treaty will be the most appropriate legal basis, since it covers economic, financial and technical cooperation. However, before making any proposal, the Commission will consider the question carefully in the light of the position expressed by Parliament. It would be helpful to have Parliament’s position so that we can finalise our proposals before the elections, as we promised.
Finally, I see that the report calls for more resources. We will have to look into it. You know the very tight situation of Heading 4 of the financial framework. One could argue that emerging countries are in transition and that the current assistance envelope should accompany that transition – that is, with a gradual shift from the development focus to non-ODA activity. We will examine this as part of the review.
These are the Commission’s initial considerations on the report that we are discussing today. We consider it to be a good basis for our common work, and I look forward to hearing what the Members have to say.
That review will take the form of a communication, accompanied by legislative proposals where appropriate. The adoption of the communication is foreseen for April 2009 and is included in the Commission’s legislative work programme.
The review is about the implementation of the instruments. It should be distinguished from the other mid-term review currently underway – and also foreseen in the regulations – which relates to the programming documents and the strategy papers for 2011-2013. This new programming will give rise to a round of democratic scrutiny, as for the first programming exercise covering 2007-2010.
The two exercises are different, but they are complementary. It is important to fix issues related to instruments before the new programming period. The strategy and programming review will take place during 2009 in order to be ready in 2010 for democratic scrutiny by Parliament.
As regards the Development Cooperation Instrument (DCI), our preliminary reflections confirm an issue that will be at the core of the review: the legislative gap as regards non-ODA activities for countries covered by the DCI.
What are these non-ODA activities? They are of various natures, but the current four preparatory actions initiated by this Parliament give a good outlook on what we are talking about: cooperation with middle-income countries in Asia and Latin America, which is not covered by the DCI, and business and scientific exchanges with China and India.
On these kinds of activities, we agree with you on the need to have legislation to cover measures which promote EU concerns in DCI countries. This could be done either through a new legal instrument or through amending the existing Industrialised Countries Instrument (ICI) Regulation.
When we prepared the new external relations instruments in 2006, we agreed that they should also cover the external dimension of our internal policies. We agreed that this could be done under the legal basis for external actions. This represented a considerable simplification compared to the previous situation.
It will be difficult for the Commission to follow this approach. We consider that the legal basis must reflect the objectives and content of the instrument. We recognise that there is a problem with non-ODA activities. By their nature, such activities do not qualify as development assistance. Therefore, a proposal that deals only with such activities cannot fall under development cooperation – under Article 179, as you mentioned."@en1
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