Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-11-25-Speech-4-046"
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"en.20101125.4.4-046"2
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"Madam President, in my introductory remarks, I talked too fast, so I will try to correct this. I will not try to impress the Members of Parliament with the speed of my speech but with the commitment which I am very clearly making here that the Commission is very much interested in having the best possible close cooperation with the Ombudsman. I think Mr Diamandouros knows this.
So there is an additional way in which we can communicate and keep the European Parliament better informed. If I may ask the assistance of the European Parliament in this particular area, I would like to ask you to insist a little bit more on correlation tables where directives are concerned. This is always the Commission’s proposal. We cannot always get it through in the final procedures when the legislator is finalising the negotiations on the Commission’s proposal, but this is possible in Parliament and the Council. The correlation tables make it much easier for the Commission to police the correct application of European law and to find errors and look for corrections.
In answer to Mr Hefner’s question concerning the EU pilot and why it is so named: this is because, when we started with this new project on creating additional possibilities for the Member States to correct their mistakes themselves more quickly, it was an accepted procedure which was started by a few Member States. Now, most of them apply it. We are still in the initial phase. So far, the results are very positive. Of course, when we reach the stage when all Member States are using this tool for better and faster application of European law, I am sure we will look for another name, because it will no longer be a pilot project.
To conclude, Madam President, I would like to thank the Members of the European Parliament and, of course, our Ombudsman, for the very satisfactory cooperation, and for a very good debate and the many new ideas which I heard this morning in the debate. I would just like to remind all of us that, thanks to the Lisbon Treaty, citizens have the right to good administration. The respect of European law is, of course, key to that – to the EU’s level playing field. I am sure that, together with the European Parliament and with the Ombudsman, we will achieve it.
Seeing Madam Durant presiding over our session this morning, I would like to highlight one additional element. This is the fact that we managed to finalise agreement on the joint EU transparency register, which will bring additional light and transparency to lobbying activities and the activities of interest representatives in Brussels. I think this is also a very important contribution to the increased transparency and higher quality of the EU legislative process.
He knows how closely we cooperate, and I think that the success rate in sorting out the problems of maladministration or other issues that he is investigating is so high because we are cooperating very closely and in a very positive spirit. Of course, sometimes you have cases with which there are additional problems which need more energy to tackle, and this was clearly true of the case to which most of you have referred.
This was very clearly a situation where the Commission was torn between, on the one hand, the commitment to transparency and the legal obligations stemming from European Court of Justice case-law and, on the other, our commitment to honour professional secrecy. If we wanted to divulge the information – which was very pertinent in this particular case – we needed the agreement of the third party, which we have spent several months trying unsuccessfully to get. Only after we made it very clear that we would publish the information anyway and informed the company that they had ten days to lodge a complaint with the European Court of Justice did we reach an agreement.
What would have happened if we had not proceeded according to our legal obligations? The complaint would probably have been filed with the European Court of Justice, and maybe we would not have had that information made public even today. So please bear with us sometimes. We are really very committed to transparency, but we must always look for a very fine line among the different commitments that we have to respect in these very complex cases.
Nevertheless, I acknowledge – as I said in my introductory remarks – that this delay was long, and that we should probably have pressed the company more. We should have got their response faster, and I can assure you that the Commission will do its utmost to ensure that we will not replicate this situation in any similar cases – we will not look for ways to drag the process out to 15 months, which was indeed unbearable. I fully agree with Mrs Paliadeli in this respect.
Regarding the access to information: again, let us just keep the numbers in proportion. We receive around 5 000 requests per year and we have 80 people working on them. Some of the files we have to make accessible are
thick. Many of them are citizens’ requests, but I can tell you that many of them are questions from very distinguished law firms trying to get additional information on very sensitive competition files. We have to be very careful with this process. I think we are doing a good job in this respect, because of these 5 000 files, only 15 to 20 end up on the Ombudsman’s desk. 85% of these requests are granted access at first request, so you can calculate how many thousand files become accessible every year. We are very serious about this commitment and we will continue to proceed in this way.
Concerning EU transposition and implementation: here, I can assure you that we are seeking very close cooperation with the European Parliament. We are fully aware that appropriate speedy transposition and correct implementation are things that glue the European Union together. They are absolutely essential for the good working of the single market. Therefore, we try to make absolutely sure that, in terms of the implementation and transposition of European law, we are very precise and very strict. If you will allow me to quote, we already agreed in the framework agreement that:
‘In order to ensure better monitoring of the transposition and application of Union law, the Commission and Parliament shall endeavour to include compulsory correlation tables and a binding time limit for transposition, which, in directives, should not normally exceed a period of 2 years.
‘In addition to specific reports and the annual report on the application of Union law, the Commission shall make available to Parliament summary information concerning all infringement procedures from the letter of formal notice, including, if so requested by Parliament, on a case-by-case basis and respecting the confidentiality rules, in particular, those acknowledged by the Court of Justice of the European Union, on the issues to which the infringement procedure relates’."@en1
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