Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-02-20-Speech-3-008"
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"en.20080220.3.3-008"2
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"Mr President, Mr Méndez de Vigo and I have the honour to present this report to Parliament on behalf of the Committee on Constitutional Affairs. It is a report in which our committee has dwelt not so much on the history of how we got here, but on the simple comparison of whether this new Treaty improves the European Union compared to the current Treaties, whether the Treaties as amended by the Treaty of Lisbon make the European Union more effective, more democratic and better for its citizens. That is what we have done, and our conclusion is clear.
Firstly, on democratic accountability: this Union will have a system whereby any legislation in the future will be subject to the prior scrutiny of national parliaments and then the double approval of the Council of Ministers, composed of ministers accountable to those very same national parliaments, and the European Parliament, directly elected by citizens to represent them at European level. That is a level of scrutiny that exists in no other international structure. You can look at the WTO, the World Bank, the IMF, NATO – nothing above the level of the nation state has that in-built degree of parliamentary scrutiny that we will have with this new Treaty.
The new Treaty also improves the powers of the European Parliament in other respects. We will elect the President of the Commission and we will have full power over the whole of the European budget, together with the Council, no longer seeing agricultural expenditure ring-fenced from parliamentary scrutiny. Parliament will have the right to block Commission implementing measures where we disagree with them. Parliament will have the right to repeal the delegation of powers to the Commission if we feel that is necessary. I see the Commissioner is already looking worried, but it is an important democratic safeguard. Parliament will also have the right to make proposals for future revisions of the Treaty, and its right to ratify, to approve international agreements has been extended. This Treaty, if nothing else, is a massive increase in democracy in the European Union.
Secondly, this Treaty improves the situation for citizens of the Union. There is, of course, the Charter of Rights, which, throughout the Union, is a guarantee that Union institutions and Union law cannot violate basic standards of human rights – European institutions will have to respect them. It provides greater clarity for citizens over the competences of the European Union. It also provides adequate guarantees to allay the misplaced fears of some that we are developing some kind of centralised superstate in the European Union.
Finally, the Treaty will make the European Union more effective, more capable of delivering in those policy areas where we want to act together at European level. The extension of qualified majority voting, the rationalisation of the size of the Commission, the merging together of the external representation posts into a single High Representative, the longer-term presidency of the European Council and other measures should make our machinery more capable of acting effectively and, therefore, our Union more capable of delivering in those policy areas where we want it to deliver.
So all these are dramatic improvements. There are some, of course, who will bemoan the loss of the Constitution – a Constitution that was, after all, ratified by a large majority of the Member States. Even in those countries that had referendums, in total 26.6 million people voted in favour of it and 23 million against. Even in my country, it was approved at second reading in the House of Commons by a large majority of 215. So it was a popular Constitution in most respects, but the test is to win the grand slam of 27 ‘yeses’ and zero ‘nos’. That is the very high threshold that it faced. It did not get through that. That was why it was abandoned by the Member States and, instead, we have reverted to amending the Treaties that we had before. However, the content of these amendments makes our Union more democratic, more effective and friendlier to citizens. I commend it to the House."@en1
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