Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-01-17-Speech-2-311"
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"en.20060117.23.2-311"2
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".
Mr President, the regulation to be voted on tomorrow on the application of the provisions of the Århus Convention to Community institutions will force us to confront decisions which are very political in nature. It concerns important environmental legislation which relates to access to environmental information and the right of citizens to participate in decision-making.
The Århus agreement is an important part of viable democracy. For that reason, citizens’ rights should not abuse the right to access to justice in order to put the brakes on projects or provide a forum for organisations’ fund collecting campaigns. Neither can I accept that the work of political decision-makers should flounder amid endless complaints from organisations. It is not appropriate to resort to the right to appeal incessantly. Abuses would undermine those citizens’ rights which we originally set out to defend. Accordingly, at the plenary reading we now have to be careful regarding how the Community actually applies the right to access to justice. I hope that Parliament will move closer to the Council’s view, which I hold to be a balanced one.
The Århus Convention, ratified in the European Community by the Member States and the EU, will be implemented by means of three directives, for which the first two pillars have already passed through the codecision procedure and conciliation. During the entire process I have been rapporteur for the reports on the Århus Convention. These pillars concern the transparency of environmental information and the Community’s right to be involved. The third directive, access to justice, will probably not go ahead, because the Member States have not achieved consensus in the matter and there has been a general feeling that the project should be shelved. The right to access to justice has also proven to be the biggest problem area in this regulation.
I have always stressed the importance of the rights of citizens regarding matters of the environment. Openness and transparency are the lifeblood of democracy and a fundamental component of our own safety. The regulation now before us, which extends the scope of the provisions of the Århus Convention to Community level, is nevertheless in danger of acquiring some worrying features. The European Parliament’s Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety, when it voted, clearly altered the focus of the provisions, taking the Convention to what in my opinion was an undesirable level. It is one thing to monitor and regulate how, for example, an authority applies and interprets the provisions of environmental legislation but quite another to monitor and regulate how a democratically elected legislator goes about his or her task. The committee’s design as it stands would in practice give all non-governmental organisations that fit the description very loosely the right to take the Community institutions to the Court of Justice of the European Communities, thus according them a kind of watchdog status with regard to said institutions. As a politician, I am not, however, prepared to delegate in this way the power democratically bestowed on me and controlled by the people, and I hope that tomorrow this matter will be put right in the plenary vote.
The most crucial areas in tomorrow’s vote relate to Amendments 22, 24 and 25. Article 230 of the Treaty allows citizens to institute proceedings in the Court of Justice of the European Communities if a decision affects the citizen directly and individually, which is only right and proper from the point of view of democracy. The position of Parliament’s Committee on the Environment now means, however, that any NGO within the EU can evade this provision by requesting an internal review, which the Community institution must reply to with a formal decision. This decision, in conjunction with Amendment 25, will clear the way for examining the legality of the original decision, and not only its procedural but also its substantive legality, and will thus give NGOs the power ultimately to evaluate the work of the Community’s institutions. This would automatically allow them to take the Community’s institutions to court, and, with such supreme authority, oversee our work.
In a democracy it is the people who are the highest authority, and the decision-makers whom they elect implement their will. Now, however, we would be placing NGOs above the people and that is difficult for me to accept. This is a political matter and one of principle. Please do not misunderstand me: we need environmental organisations, and the world would be a much poorer place if NGOs had not justifiably raised many important questions. Nevertheless, what they are now trying to drive through for themselves, with some heavy lobbying, is disquieting.
Furthermore, the definition of NGOs in the regulation is a very loose one, and for that reason I have tabled two amendments for the House which set out the criteria in greater detail. The first states that an NGO must have operated in more than one EU country for at least two years. The other amendment adds the words ‘compliant with the law’ to the definition. These amendments are essential for requests for reviews to remain within controllable limits and in order to obtain additional criteria for the nature of the work of NGOs.
The members of our committee in this report have tabled amendments which I am happy to agree with. I myself have emphasised the importance, for example, of the quality and comparability of environmental information. Similarly, I support the democratic nature and transparency of our decision-making whenever I can.
In fact, however, that is all I want from the environmental organisations. If they themselves complied with what they demand of us, if they were more transparent in their activities and funding procedures, and if they gave less misleading and mistaken information, we would not need to impose these restrictions and criteria. From the global point of view, it has been disappointing to observe that NGOs do not by any means always disseminate the correct information or correct what has been shown to be mistaken information.
A good example of this is the letter that came this week from the biggest environmental organisations, which gives the wrong picture of the opportunity that is possibly now opening up to them of access to justice in court. They mention that industrial companies are able to institute proceedings in the Court of Justice, and now this legislation would only bring them to the same level. The letter fails to mention that the environmental organisations do by no means aspire to the same level as companies, regarding which there is a call for this decision to affect them ‘directly and individually’, in other words, as an interested party. Instead, the environmental organisations should now be able to choose, within the entire Union and ignoring criteria relating to interested parties, which area they are interested in. It was misleading that this essential detail was left unsaid."@en1
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