Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-02-28-Speech-4-066"
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"en.20020228.4.4-066"2
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"I would like to make three comments with regard to the financing of the Convention that will prepare for the 2004 Intergovernmental Conference. Firstly, the representatives from the Member States have succeeded in putting together a complicated arrangement, when it could have been much simpler; secondly, this complexity will backfire on them; and thirdly, it will be so much harder to implement because essential expenditure has visibly not been included.
First and foremost, the interests of simplicity and logic dictate that, to finance the Convention, Member States should have created a fund financed directly from their own contributions and controlled by themselves: the Convention is, in effect, a unique body, set up outside the Treaties as part of an intergovernmental process in preparation for an Intergovernmental Conference. Instead of this, they have formulated a complicated procedure, under the terms of which funds are partly financed by the Community institutions, Parliament, the Council and the Commission, pursuant to an ‘interinstitutional agreement’ that gives the aforementioned the right to examine Convention expenditure. For example, Article No 20 of the basic decision states that discharge of the Fund’s expenditure can only be granted by the Member States after the three institutions have given their assent; Article No 6 of the agreement states that these institutions should be regularly informed of the implementation of expenditure; Article No 4 states that any increase must be authorised by them.
This complicated arrangement gives the institutions a means of influencing the Convention’s expenditure, and therefore the way in which it functions and, lastly, its decisions, There is no doubt at all that this power, if used effectively, will be used against the Member States.
Finally, there will be plenty of opportunities for conflict, for it already seems that the total budget for the Convention (EUR 10.5 million for the first ten months), has been underestimated. In fact, the working conditions of the various parliamentary representatives – the European Parliament, the national parliaments of the Member States and the national parliaments of the candidate countries, are quite unequal, and this three-speed system, in which the European Parliament is disproportionately privileged, will, in all fairness, prove untenable. We therefore need to provide additional resources to the other two categories, or at least to the third."@en1
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