Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-06-04-Speech-3-286"
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".
Madam President, I should like to congratulate Mrs Smet on the exceptional analysis in her report of the open coordination procedure and on the topicality of the debate, given that, as we know, this issue is also being discussed in the Convention.
There are two essential categories of issues. Those which concern the democratic legalisation of the procedure and those which concern its efficiency. As far as democratic legalisation of the procedure is concerned, our experience to date is that only in the field of employment is there a legal basis in the Treaty. It is therefore an open procedure, which is applied with very specific rules defined in the Treaty and Parliament plays a role in this procedure. It could be much stronger, but it has a role and its opinion is necessary and respected. However, as Mrs Smet quite rightly said, no legal basis has been used for the other applications of the open coordination procedure. They have been based on agreements by the Council of Ministers. Consequently, the role of Parliament is still reduced, even though I must say that both on the issue of combating poverty – where we have an application of the procedure – and on the application of the procedure to pensions, an important effort has been made for us to cooperate with, consult and inform Parliament. In future, this procedure will certainly play an important role. We see that it is beginning to appear in numerous individual policies. The problems of the participation of Parliament, and hence its democratic legalisation, have not only their European but also their national dimension. In the evaluation we carried out, we saw that, in numerous countries, the national parliaments not only do not participate but also are hardly even told of the targets, commitments and method of implementation of the joint action plans. I believe, therefore, that with the discussion taking place in the Convention, it is very important for there to be an article covering the open cooperation procedure, determining the role of Parliament and, as the Commission has proposed, for there to be a special reference to the application of this procedure to social protection, where there are various problems, given that many of these competences in the social sector are national.
Now as far as the area of efficiency is concerned, I would agree with the report that a national and European evaluation of the results plays a very important role in year-on-year improvements. Our first experience is the evaluation of the European strategy, of the application of the procedure in the area of employment carried out in 2002, while we shall have the evaluation of the application in the field of pensions in 2006. A second element relating to efficiency is if there will be financing of the application of the procedure. We must say here that, so far, there is experience concerning financing of the strategy for employment by the social fund and financing of specific guidelines, mainly those directed at human resources, and we believe that, for the area of enlargement in particular, for the new countries which will be called on to participate in the implementation of the procedure, but with reduced resources, the social fund can play a very important part.
Finally, I should like to refer to the observation in the report that mainstreaming the gender dimension in all Community policies can also play a very important role in the application of the open coordination procedure, given that this is where individual targets which might concern equality of the two sexes are always identified."@en1
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