Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-03-24-Speech-3-087"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20100324.13.3-087"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spoken text |
"Mr President, I would really like to thank Parliament for putting this very important item on the agenda. I would like to personally thank my dear friend, Diego López Garrido, and the Spanish Presidency, for keeping this on top of the Spanish Presidency’s agenda, because I believe that the instrument we are going to have will really change the way we do politics in the European Union.
And, as you would agree, these are clear and very important parameters for having this legislation prepared in this way, because only these parameters would guarantee that citizens would use this instrument for better communication with the Commission and with the European institutions.
Drawing on the results of the consultations and also on the proposals made by the European Parliament, the Commission is currently finalising its proposal. I hope that the College will adopt the proposals we are working on on 31 March. I can also tell you that this probably would not be possible without strong encouragement from the Spanish Presidency. It is very clear that such a top priority for the Presidency must be respected, and I know there is strong commitment from Spain to try to make progress on this initiative within the term of its Presidency.
So, I am very hopeful that, thanks to the constructive approach of the Presidency, the Council and Parliament, we will have this new and very important instrument in place well before the first anniversary of the Lisbon Treaty coming into force.
Until now, the European construct was based on representative democracy. I think this was very well reflected also in the Lisbon Treaty, where it is very clear that Parliament’s powers are very much strengthened and when we are going to include the national parliaments more in the European legislative process. And we needed to complement it with greater inclusion of citizens in this process, through this instrument of participatory democracy.
There was the debate, a while ago, on whether one cancels out the other and whether it is a zero-sum game. I really do not think so because I consider both elements of representative and participatory democracy as mutually reinforcing, and both help to create real European political and public space.
I also believe that, thanks to this instrument, we will underline even more the importance of European citizenship for Europeans. As Diego has already said, I am also convinced that this would lead to stronger, better cross-border Europe-wide debates in Europe, more on European topics, and not only on national topics that we see so often in the capitals of our Member States.
The Commission was and is very grateful for the work the European Parliament has already done on the European Citizens’ Initiative. For us, the resolution you adopted on 7 May last year was very important political guidance and a very important pointer as to how we should prepare this initiative.
As you know, the Commission, when preparing such important pieces of legislation like this one, wants to engage the European public in as wide a discussion as possible. Therefore, we organised a public debate on this issue, based on the Green Paper that we issued in December last year.
I must say that we have been very positively surprised by the responses we have got. We got more than 300 responses coming from a range of contributors: individual citizens, organisations, public authorities and even some national parliaments.
We evaluated the responses we got and completed the consultation process with a public debate in Brussels, where more than 150 stakeholders were in attendance, including honourable representatives of Parliament.
If I had to sum up this debate, I would say that there were a lot of innovative, interesting and positive suggestions coming to the Commission’s table. What were the major conclusions? That citizens are very much interested in having this initiative in place as soon as possible, that they would like to have it as user-friendly as possible, that they would like to have it simple, straightforward, understandable and, most of all, accessible."@en1
|
| lpv:unclassifiedMetadata | |
| lpv:videoURI |
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples