Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-10-27-Speech-4-023"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20051027.3.4-023"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:translated text |
"Mr President, firstly I would like to thank both the Ombudsman and Mr Mavrommatis for their excellent report, and would like to begin by making a personal observation. I am an MEP from a new Member State, and when we discussed the annual report of the Ombudsman last year, I had no personal experience with the Committee on Petitions or with the institution of the Ombudsman.
However, as Mr Mavrommatis mentioned in his report, in the course of the activities of the Ombudsman last year and his campaign in the new Member States, a great number of Hungarian citizens became aware of their right to submit a petition to the European Union. I am delighted to see that they are actually exercising this right, as well, and – even if the petitions submitted do not always comply with the expectations of the Union and we do not always know what to do with them – it is of considerable assistance to citizens of new Member States to have another forum to contact.
As mentioned by Mrs Wallström in her speech, the Commission has a reform plan to assist our efforts. European citizens are justified to expect public institutions to work efficiently and openly. I hope that in the future the Commission will implement the reform endeavours formulated in the speech.
Echoing the opinions communicated by many of my colleagues in the course of the debate, I, too, would like to ask the Council – as expressed by the Ombudsman in his special report – to consider opening up all Council sessions to the personnel of the other EU institutions. But if the Council insists on making all political decisions behind closed doors, at least the legislation procedure should be made transparent to us, and we should be allowed to be present when such decisions are made. Mr Diamandouros prepared a material last year resulting in an even closer cooperation between the Ombudsman and the Committee on Petitions, and created the so-called European Network of Ombudsmen, mentioned in his introduction. This is also to be welcome, and I am very pleased that this year the delegates of the Committee on Petitions have been able to take part in the meeting of this network, too.
I would like to summarise my comments by pointing out to all of us that the activity of the European Ombudsman in the past ten years has been really successful, but there are still a great number of tasks to be tackled. And all of us, as well as all EU institutions and bodies must focus on these tasks, so that European citizens can feel that we are working for them, for the assertion of their rights and for finding solutions to public matters in their interest."@en1
|
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples