Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-04-04-Speech-2-197"
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"en.20060404.22.2-197"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to talk about three aspects, starting with the issue of simplification. There is no doubt that this House is, as a matter of principle, backing the Commission in its efforts at simplifying the lawmaking process, but I also want to make it clear that here, as in so many other instances, the devil is in the detail, and that we have to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Last of all, let me turn to the third issue, that of
that is to say the process whereby the interested parties are listened to. In preparing legislation, the Commission has come to rely very heavily on Europe-wide organisations and associations. I have nothing against the European lobbying associations, but the processes whereby they arrive at decisions are sometimes more complex than those in the Council of Ministers, and what emerges from them is often consensus compacted into nonsense. I believe we need still other forms of consultative machinery in order to get the information directly from those interested parties who are working at their jobs and therefore have to deal with these issues. So, for example, the consultative machinery we came up with through the network currently engaged in developing European contract law, with which we defined a limited category of person to be consulted, could be a good example of how to improve these mechanisms.
Let me give you an example. Looking at this document from the Commission, for example, I see that they want to simplify the whole body of commercial and company law; now I know, as one of the Legal Affairs Committee’s permanent rapporteurs on this area, that many of the directives and regulations we have enacted on this were the result of highly complex negotiations and compromises and that there is, in any proposal for simplification, the inherent risk of Pandora’s box being opened and of the compromises arrived at after much effort ending up being once more open to question. That means that simplification is an instrument that must be handled with great care.
It is for that reason that I believe that it is very definitely advisable that we should give some thought, when simplifying just as much as when codifying, to the possibility of the three institutions adopting an inter-institutional agreement stating in clear terms how one goes about simplifying laws.
A second point to which I should like the Commission to give some thought is the issue of what priorities simplification proposals should set. Directives are customarily addressed to the national legislatures rather than to the public, and the laws with which practitioners have to deal are those enacted at the national level. It follows that the simplification of directives should be no more than a secondary objective. The Commission should give priority to regulations, for the simple reason that regulations are directly applicable as law and have a direct effect on those members of the public who have recourse to law.
The second issue has to do with impact assessment. I want once more to ram home the point that most of us in this House regard an independent element in the assessment of laws’ impact as vitally necessary. In a report it produced in December, this House called for an independent agency on the American model. For my part, I want to make it clear that this is not a
for me; it is something we can talk about. What I do regard as indispensable, though, is the participation of an independent external element in the assessment of the impact laws have. It is not acceptable that the officials who make proposals are also and at the same time the ones who are responsible for gauging what impact those proposals will have, for the consequence of that is that the impact assessment ends up being no more and no less than part of the justification for them, and that is not what we want. It is for that reason, then, that I believe we have to hammer out something sensible with the Commission in relation to this issue.
An inter-institutional agreement has been in place since December 2003, according to which the Commission is, in principle, responsible for the impact assessment. That also means, though, that it is exercising a responsibility with and on behalf of the legislature, that is to say, for Parliament and the Council, and so we believe that we in this House, too, should have – and do have – a right to be consulted as to how this impact assessment is carried out.
I might add that that is also the reason why we, in the Conference of Presidents, initially delayed adopting a resolution on the follow-up administrative agreements, since these, of course, have to be renegotiated, not least in the light of the resolutions that we will be adopting on these four reports in May of this year.
I would also like to say something about something that is very definitely a live issue. On 16 March, Advocate-General Sharpston delivered an opinion in the case of Spain versus the Council, in the conclusions to which she refers explicitly to the impact assessment, stating that the absence of any adequate impact assessment is an indication of the legal act having been adopted arbitrarily, and that demonstrates and confirms the Court of Justice’s increasing interest in this issue.
Further to what Mr Doorn has had to say on the subject, I think it is crucial that decisions arrived at by way of comitology also need to have their impact assessed. There are a whole load of cases that we could take as examples, where the real bureaucratic madness lay in the comitological decisions rather than in the legislation itself, so, here too, there needs to be proper monitoring of what impact laws have."@en1
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"stake holder consultation"1
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