Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-02-14-Speech-2-009-000"
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"en.20120214.3.2-009-000"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, Minister, please believe me when I say that, with this being my first speech before this House as chair of the Committee on Fisheries, I would rather not have had to make it, because we are not only going to talk about fishing, total allowable catches (TACs) and quotas – although these are very important – but also issues of jurisdiction.
The Members of the European Parliament thought that we should allow some time to elapse. However, we are – and I say this clearly – most disappointed because in 2012, three years after the Treaty of Lisbon came into force, there are still major discrepancies between what the Commission proposes and what the Council approve, on the one hand, and what the Regulation states on the other. In my view, neither institution has given any indication that it is willing to abandon this broad interpretation of Article 43(3) for once and for all, and adopt another procedure that is more respectful of Parliament’s prerogatives.
To conclude, there is unanimity among groups, coordinators and all the Members. We have made our approach very clear in our oral questions and I would like the Commission and the Council to answer the questions we have put to them today just as clearly.
The question I asked on behalf of the Committee on Fisheries relates to the Treaty of Lisbon and how it should be applied in the area of fisheries policies, and, as I said previously, this goes much further than an isolated discrepancy. It concerns the undertaking by the three institutions – Parliament, the Council and the Commission – to accept the rules of the game that we agreed upon, based on the premise which underlies the Treaty: to take appropriate decisions, each according to its responsibilities, in the interests of the citizens of Europe.
There is no doubt that the new Treaty has made major changes to the decision-making process for fisheries policy, and understandably it is going to take time to make the necessary adjustments to ensure that the new procedures operate correctly and in full. However, unfortunately we have learned from experience in the two years since the Treaty came into force that the Council and, in some cases, the Commission continue to deliberately – or so I believe – put up obstacles in an attempt to prevent Parliament from exercising its new prerogatives. This is unacceptable.
Parliament cannot accept under any circumstances that the Council should continue to operate as if nothing had changed, as if Parliament were a mere bystander and the Treaty of Lisbon and the new division of competences had never existed. Minister, Commissioner, whether you like it or not, Parliament cannot be excluded from making decisions on fisheries policy, whether internal or external. These are not my words, they are the Treaty’s.
Now, once again, following the Commission’s proposal, the Council has sought to exceed the scope of Article 43(3) of the Treaty, quite unacceptably in our view, in an attempt to exclude Parliament’s voice from the decision-making process.
The procedure laid down in this article clearly refers to the fixing and allocation of fishing opportunities, that is, decisions on TACs and quotas, and to these two aspects alone – not to a whole series of other measures for achieving the objectives of the common fisheries policy, which would be covered by Article 43(2).
As is stated in the preamble to the question, technical measures, such as prohibition or restricted zones and periods, restricted fishing depths and specific requirements related to fishing gear can in no way be interpreted as falling under the remit of Article 43(3).
Parliament’s position is quite clear. We have been stating it for some time now: you cannot take a broad interpretation which is in clear contradiction with any exceptional status. Our reaction, in various dossiers, has always been to seek proportionate measures. We clashed over the Venezuela–French Guiana dossier, when the Council decided to forge ahead without Parliament’s consent. We had no alternative than to go to the European Court of Justice. Also when we opposed the Council’s blocking of long-term plans for hake and anchovy; we disagreed and we chose the first reading to try to negotiate seriously with the Council for a second reading.
In terms of TAC and quota regulations we have been even more tolerant, if that is possible. It has not escaped our attention that what was adopted in 2010 and 2011 – in both cases on the basis of Article 43(3) – was done incorrectly. We continued to insist that sufficient time should elapse before the Council and the Commission could take joint decisions and were operating correctly. However, now of course we realise that in this case they are introducing a recital on certain conditions, functionally linked to the fixing and allocation of fishing opportunities, when clearly the concept of associated conditions, formerly covered in Article 20 of the Regulation, has been explicitly omitted from the new Treaty."@en1
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