Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-04-24-Speech-5-009"
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"en.20090424.2.5-009"2
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"Madam President, I should like to congratulate Ms Frassoni on her report. I think she and I now, over a period of two or three years, have enjoyed working together on this report on behalf of Parliament. That cooperation I have enjoyed; I do not enjoy the fact that we seem to end up every year repeating much the same things and having a certain sense that we are going round and round in circles.
It ought to be pretty simple, because this is about our citizens being able to see what European law is; when there is a problem, to be able to see what the enforcement process is; and, finally, to see the result of that enforcement. But, as it is, we seem to have to keep trying to invent new mechanisms all the time to actually deal with a process that is already there but is not obvious and is not transparent.
We have made some progress in that the beginning of the process, in the sense of making EU law understandable, has now been taken on board by the Commission, and I am pleased that we now see, with some regularity, so-called citizens’ summaries prefacing pieces of legislation, so that we can all see – and those we represent can see – where we ought to be heading and what the law ought to achieve.
But when it comes to the enforcement process, we still seem to be in a position where the decision to enforce or not is less than obvious – why that decision may or may not be taken – and citizens are often left wondering. We have recently received a letter from somebody who had tried to get a piece of legislation enforced and is now so disgusted with the whole European set-up, having been pro-European, that they now support an anti-European party.
That is the point: if we do not get this right, we bring the whole of European law and the whole of our institutions into disrepute. It is as serious as that. All of us as Members, in these last days of this mandate, are spending our time tearing around, going from trialogue to trialogue and first-reading agreement to first-reading agreement, arguing about sets of words, the contents of sentences in legislation. That is great. But if, at the end of the day, it is not enforced in the way that our citizens expect, we might ask ourselves: what is the point?
All of our institutions have a responsibility concerning the monitoring of EU law. You, the Commission, have the primary responsibility, and I wish in a way that we did not have to have this debate in this style every year."@en1
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