Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-04-22-Speech-3-317"
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"en.20090422.53.3-317"2
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"Mr President, I rise to speak here as a passionate pro-European, and am convinced that we are currently receiving a lesson in what EU democracy should not look like. The fact that the Council does not deem it in any way necessary to meet Parliament’s very clear criticisms in any acceptable form whatsoever unfortunately shows that all the critics of the EU, and also those who now reject the institution, are right, as we are flagrantly disregarding precisely the fundamental principles on which a democracy should be based.
Treaty after Treaty, we have been allowing the centre of power to remain completely unsupervised in reality and the Council – and this can be proven – to be lazy and incompetent and to operate largely in secret. I say ‘lazy’ because it can be proven that the majority of ministers – that is, those who take the decisions that are really important to Europe behind closed doors – are often not even present, and civil servants take decisions on extremely fundamental issues. This used to happen in Austria until 1848, after which the situation improved somewhat. This is not democracy.
The Council is not even willing to grant access to the agenda items that are being discussed. Members can work this out themselves minutely, detail by detail, via parliamentary questions – as I have done – and the results are frightful. These people are simply lazing around. Those who are, in reality, more important in legislative terms than us MEPs are leaving others to turn up in their place.
It is also claimed that there is now more transparency in the Council when, in actual fact, there has been less transparency in that institution since the 2006 Council Decision. A single agenda item out of 130 in the most important Council – the External Relations Council – was dealt with in public in 2008. Everything else was discussed in camera. Everything else is less transparent than the Mafia.
Then there is the use of funds. Where do the many millions of euro go? Why is the Council refusing to cooperate on this? What is the attitude of the House towards a secret service that is being extended more and more under the leadership of Javier Solana? Javier Solana is based in Spain, which admits that there is, of course, an EU secret service. Where does the money go? How corrupt are these people, and how lacking are they in transparency?"@en1
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