Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-05-09-Speech-1-184-000"
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"en.20110509.22.1-184-000"2
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"Madam President, this has been a complicated issue to deal with. We have over a thousand bilateral investment agreements. According to the Treaty of Lisbon, this falls within the competence of the EU. How should we handle this situation?
It is not proving to be very easy. We have had a lot of meetings and we have tried to find a common position, but without success. I might as well be honest about that. We will have to vote on it and see what Parliament’s position will be. I would have liked us to have had a position that we all agreed on in order to be better placed to enter into negotiations with the Council. We would then have been able to defend Parliament’s powers and principles as laid down in the Treaty. That was not to be, on account of the fact that this is a sensitive subject, particularly when it comes to how to deal with the old agreements. With regard to the new agreements that the Member States are continuing and are entitled to enter into, we could undoubtedly have agreed on a policy in which there is a reasonable balance between the rights of investors and other rights.
This was difficult to do with regard to the old agreements, however, and I have therefore retained the compromises that we proposed in committee, as the vote was very even. I still hope that we have a more up-to-date view of the investment agreements than was the case with many of these old agreements, where we were the ones who invested in other countries. Nowadays, we have at least as many investments coming into our Member States. We must therefore make sure that we have the necessary scope in our policy and also that investments are adapted to more developed, modern work in relation to the environment and social matters. We must defend this part of the Treaty. Investment policy cannot fail to take it into account, either. As I said, we will have to see how the vote goes tomorrow.
Another problem we have here is the fact that we cannot even use the reasoning of providing maximum protection for investments. That is not the right way to create legal certainty. Since the new trade policy is more balanced, we must also have a more balanced view of what maximum protection can entail. We surely do not want to provide maximum protection here to foreign state-owned companies, or even companies owned by dictatorships, at the expense of human rights and the environment. This is a balance that I hope we will be able to achieve. The idea is not that we should use investment agreements to achieve social objectives, but neither should they prevent us from achieving social and environmental objectives. This is a far-reaching debate.
Another important debate concerns transparency. We recognise that Parliament and the EU have been given new competences. The Commission is now responsible. Therefore, it must also have access to the documents. We must increase transparency. Many of these agreements were written at a time when there were hardly any cases of dispute settlements. Now we have more than 300 cases and ongoing procedures. This must, therefore, be opened up to better scrutiny. We cannot have this total secrecy and I very much hope that, irrespective of what we think about this link between policy and investment, when it comes to transparency, we can stand united and defend openness and the new competences bestowed on us by the Treaty. I truly hope that that will be the case. I therefore hope that Amendment 13 will receive support. Without it, we will have absolutely no democratic control over these procedures. We need this if we are to retain and defend legal certainty.
We are also seeing a tendency for many other countries, like the United States, Australia and Canada for example, to start to look at renewing their agreements. It will be good if we can agree to update the existing dispute mechanisms and judicial procedures, because these are outdated and need to be brought up to date and made more transparent. Then we will have an investment policy for the future. That will be dealt with in a different context – the debate about the future itself."@en1
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