GwendalTsang/DEFT09-parquet huggingface dataset:
Madam President, like other Members of this House, I too see no reason for excessive euphoria with regard to the results of the Monterrey Conference. It is true that the Conference produced some small steps forward, especially if we consider the current situation of development funding and if we take account of the very limited prospects that had already been outlined before the Conference. Amongst these steps, I include, of course, the proposals by the European Union to increase its development aid by USD 20 billion by 2006 and even the annual increase of USD 5 billion that the United States has proposed. I am also taking account of the fact that the European Union has set, for the first time and in a way that is binding on the Member States, the precise and focussed objective of achieving 0.39% of GDP by 2006 as the Community average and as an interim stage for achieving the objective of 0.7%. It must be acknowledged, however, that these are excessively limited steps, which fall considerably short of current needs and possibilities. Moreover, this is the only conclusion that we can draw, given the constant reductions we have seen in the field of public development aid in the last decade, of which all but a limited number of Member States of the European Union are guilty, as if to confirm the rule. Such a conclusion is also inevitable if we consider the decisions and recommendations reiterated on successive occasions by the United Nations, specifically the objectives of the millennium plan to reduce extreme poverty by 2015, or even the very hopes raised by the commitment given at the Gothenburg Council to achieve the objective of 0.7% as quickly as possible. It should be added, however, that no measure was adopted on solving the problem of external debt, despite the fact that this is still one of the fundamental parameters of the economic development of the poorest countries, as Mr Mantovani states in the courageous explanatory statement of his report, which we welcome. In this framework, given the importance of the financial strand, I would say that the results of September’s World Summit on Sustainable Development look as though they are going to have a rather more limited scope than we would wish them to have. Let us hope, nevertheless, that, in this and in other fields, more promising steps can be taken in Johannesburg.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, the annual adaptation of Directive 1408/71, which we are dealing with at the moment, is a technical matter. The likelihood of implementing fundamental changes at the moment is therefore rather slim, although these changes are desperately needed, as everyone is all too aware. My group would therefore argue in favour of a resolution which has been tabled jointly with the , the and GUE, as was indicated a moment ago. First of all, the Council should adopt the Commission proposal for extending the directive’s scope, in order to cover third-country nationals who reside in the EU lawfully, for they are clearly being discriminated against at present. This is in contravention of the Charter of Fundamental rights and Article 12 of the Treaty, and clashes with the concept of the Citizens’ Europe. ‘Citizens’ Europe does not only refer to the European citizen, but also to all citizens in Europe. I hope that the Council will commit itself to a so-called inclusive approach. A second important point, which has already been made, concerns frontier workers. Mrs Oomen-Ruijten and, in actual fact, Mrs Van Lancker before her, as well as others, have already made huge efforts in this respect. Time and again, Parliament has asked the Council and the Commission to lift the barriers in terms of taxation and social security for this group, but so far to little or no avail. It is therefore high time that legislation was drafted in this field. But there is a time and place for everything. The place is this Parliament, but the time, Mrs Oomen-Ruijten, is not now. It would be short-sighted to try to improve the position of frontier workers or third-country nationals in the present technical amendment without any chance of success. Not only will this slow down the completion of this resolution, it will also slow down the much-wished-for, wholesale reviews. Let us not pursue a defeatist strategy, but rather focus our efforts on actual improvement.

Political group: Verts-ALE
Madam President, I would like to comment on the request Mrs Stenzel has made to postpone the vote on the Community initiative EQUAL until tomorrow. In fact, this initiative was the subject of a very lively debate in committee, and, given that it is a major Commission proposal, which refers to the agreements we reached last year, I consider it admissible. We agree with Mrs Stenzel that the request to postpone the vote is admissible in the interests of achieving the greatest possible agreement between the groups, so that Parliament can express its position on this initiative with the broadest majority possible.

Political group: PSE
This report is in line with the process of liberalising the electricity and natural gas markets and takes account of the decisions of the Stockholm and Barcelona European Councils, advocating the new guidelines for these sectors following the decision to liberalise. It therefore states that, as a rule, the construction and maintenance of infrastructures in the energy sector should be subject to market principles. This exerts pressure for the sector’s privatisation, including its infrastructures, and this is something we do not agree with. Although the rapporteur claims that the aim of competition and completion of the internal energy market should be implemented in such a way as to allow for universal service obligations, the options it favours for supporting the funding of priority projects, even in tricky areas, cannot exceed 20% and then only in exceptional cases. Nevertheless, it goes further than the Commission proposal, which was only of 10%, but only mentions the construction phase, which remains subject to the non-distortion of competition between undertakings, which means advocating liberalisation in this field too and subjecting it to the criteria of economic rather than social benefit.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, I like this report, and would like to congratulate the rapporteur on what he has said and, moreover, congratulate the Commission on its Green Paper, for, by it, the Commission is making us aware of our dependence on energy. I can recall no debate in the past twenty years which has pointed out our dependence on imported energy in the way this Green Paper has. Thank you again. I would like to make two observations on nuclear energy. Unlike many in my group, I take the view that it has a future. I believe that we should also express that in a positive way. Secondly, and this is perhaps even more important than the first point, I would like to observe that we have been given the task of developing a clean coal-fired power station. I say this also with reference to our obligations as a result of Kyoto. A clean coal-fired power station is not only of interest to Europe, but also to the world. For let us not forget, as the Commission repeatedly emphasised, that in the next one or two generations, our dependence on fossil energy, at any rate worldwide, will be up to 80% and it is all the more important to master combustion technologies.

Political group: PSE
Mr President, Mr Napolitano has hit the nail on the head on this issue. Competence in the legislative and budgetary fields, and in the area of national control, belongs to national parliaments. In the supranational context, these competences can only be exercised by a supranational parliament, whatever structure the Convention or the next Intergovernmental Conference may give to this body. Mr Napolitano has emphasised the importance of maintaining this difference in powers, and most importantly has underlined the real danger of certain powers bypassing the competence of the national parliaments, in the field of foreign affairs and within the third pillar, for example, which should not be entrusted to a supranational Parliament. There is another, much more subtle, way of eroding parliamentary power, which we are now considering, the so-called open method of coordination that is commitology, which is used, for example, in the Lamfalussy report, with few opportunities for parliamentary control, self-regulation or co-regulation. I believe that this is an issue that the Napolitano report has also highlighted and to which we should give our full attention.

Political group: PSE
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, when President Wahid took office in Indonesia, Europeans that we are, we dared hope that the political climate in this country would improve under a president who defended human rights, was opposed to any form of sectarianism and supported the religious neutrality of the state. Despite a certain amount of progress, despite encouraging signs which there is too little time now to list, there is terrible violence in Indonesia today and the country is caught up in a spiral of insurgence and religious conflict. Today the European Parliament needs to reach a real consensus on its proposals which cuts across its political divides and groups. In fact, Mr President, Commissioner, violence in northern Sumatra, in the province of Aceh, in Papua and in the Moluccas, as my fellow member has just reminded us, and repeated massacres between religious communities, with calls for crusades on either side, from Muslim and Christian extremists alike, have been going on since 1999. These massacres and exactions are intolerable and Parliament has already denounced them. In the new resolution before us today, the European Union reiterates four main points. First, we must support the call by several authorities, especially the religious authorities, for the Secretary-General of the United Nations to come to the assistance of the Indonesian government in order to prevent further massacre. Secondly, we must welcome the arrest of the warlords openly calling for civil and religious war as evidence of the will of the Indonesian authorities to support a peace process in all the regions involved. We must support the efforts of these authorities. Thirdly, these initiatives only make sense if the economic situation in the archipelago really can be improved. Consequently, we need to intervene, including at a financial level, in order to help reconstruct a civil society which really respects the human rights, especially the religious rights, of the people of this country. Without political and financial aid on our part, there is a risk of the walls closing round the contradictions of the Indonesian experiment, which would probably put an end to the democratisation process which, all said and done, is still in its infancy. And fourthly, in these situations of extreme confusion, we need to get to the bottom of all these exactions. Only an independent inquiry by international human rights experts can do this. We call on the Indonesian government in our resolution to set up just such a committee of inquiry.

Political group: PSE
Madam President, since the second part is decisive for all of us as to whether we can vote on the first part, I would ask you to vote on the second part first. Then we will know whether, as far as the first part is concerned, we can vote together with the large group which proposes this.

Political group: Verts-ALE
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, we are attending this debate on budgets at this late hour more than anything else in order to accompany the general rapporteur, Mr Mulder, so that he may feel accompanied and supported by the political groups in this House, with a view to the conciliation which is going to take place on 16 July. I would like to say that our group, the , fully supports the strategy laid out by the general rapporteur with a view to the conciliation with the other two institutions. We believe that this first conciliation is of great importance, given that it is the first real exchange of requests and strategies between the three institutions, and I therefore believe we have proposed a conciliation strategy which will be particularly useful and beneficial to the interests of the European Parliament and of the European citizens in general, which is the reason why we are here. From this strategy which we are taking to the conciliation, the report by Mr Mulder, I simply wanted to highlight certain points which are the subjects of our group’s amendments. In particular, with regard to fisheries, we have heard the explanations given us by the rapporteur on budgets of the Committee on Fisheries, Mrs Langenhagen, and we fully agree with them. We believe that the Council must fulfil the commitments which were established for the financing of this scrapping fund, not only in 2003, but also in 2004, and that is why we are proposing amendments to the Färm report and also the Mulder report, although we know that they will possibly not be accepted by some of the groups in this House. We attach so much importance to this that the Chairman of the Committee on Fisheries will form an integral part of the delegation from our group which will go to the budget conciliation, because we want to stress how important the issue of fisheries commitments is to the Committee on Fisheries, to Parliament in general and to our political group. Finally, another issue which we wish to highlight is the application of the N+2 rule, which has been discussed earlier. Our argument – and this is expressed in our amendment – is that there is a need for an assessment. We believe we are at the beginning of the process of applying the N+2 rule and, therefore, rather than making value judgments about what approximation the Commission should carry out in the application of this rule, what really interests us is to be given an assessment of how it is being applied, what the initial results are and, on that basis, to produce a common strategy in this Parliament on the application of the N+2 rule on the part of the Commission in the Member States.

Political group: PPE-DE
Commissioner, Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, I should firstly like to confess that I am confused as to the relevance of this debate, at this late hour, when the Council is very close to reaching an agreement on the Commission’s proposal regarding the plan for a European agency to manage external borders, and when it provides for a series of amendments that are diametrically opposed to the position proposed by Parliament in Mr von Boetticher’s report. I should also like to point out that these documents illustrate, once again, how difficult it is to establish genuine cooperation between Parliament and the Council, as is still all too often the case. The consultation procedure becomes a battleground, in which the two sides do not compete on an equal footing; two approaches finally square up in these documents, and the one in favour of citizens’ rights is doomed to defeat. Parliament proposes, on the one hand, that this agency should be given a less intergovernmental structure, with the composition of these bodies, which would involve the Commission more in the aim of greater effectiveness. On the other hand, the Council is preparing to meet the wishes of the Member States that each should have a representative on the Administrative Board, which will naturally damage the effectiveness that we had wanted the agency to have. This is severely disappointing. The Council’s intransigence is made all the more serious by the fact that it affects the protection of human rights. We believe that the new agency’s responsibilities must not include the expulsion of people from third countries living illegally in Member States. Unfortunately, the Council does not share this opinion, and it does not appear to have any intention of changing its position. What grounds does it have for putting such a measure in place? Can it really be said that the EU has a common policy on asylum and immigration that would justify this proposal? I feel that the answer to this question is clearly ‘no’ – this common policy does not exist, at least not yet. To my mind, we will not take the EU forward by going down the road of a totally repressive policy aimed at speeding up cooperation between Member States in repatriating illegal immigrants. It strikes me that the Council would be better advised to put its mind to the complex, yet absolutely vital task of analysing the causes of migratory flows and the reasons why large numbers of people leave their countries of origin. Given that we have not approached this analysis collectively, I feel that the measures that we are going to take will partly be in vain.

Political group: PSE
Mr President, even Paris is divided over Nice. The French President and the First Minister seem to be more obsessed with their own political future than with that of Europe. The French Presidency has shown little enough consistency, and where it has this has mainly been in terms of its lack of neutrality and the preferential treatment it has given to the large Member States, and that at a time when the Union has never been more in need of a President who looks for consensus. In order to make room for the newcomers, all Member States need to move a little closer together, but they only do so when they really cannot put off the evil moment any longer. It seems as if some governments are already reconciling themselves to a new IGC for enlargement. The governments have lost sight of the urgent need for reforms because they are concentrating too much on their own position of power in the new set-up. For example, many a country will emphasise that majority decision making must become the general rule, but at the same, will come up with so many exceptions that precious little remains on balance. If majority voting does not become the general rule then decision-making will become irretrievably deadlocked, as Mr Prodi rightly commented a moment ago. If this does not go hand-in-hand with codecision then democracy will be further undermined. The weighting of votes in the Council must do justice to the population numbers in the Member States, which means that it is quite acceptable for there to be some corresponding differences between the larger and smaller countries. All Member States must retain one Commissioner of their own during this enlargement round. Only afterwards should we decide on a new system on the basis of the experience we will have gained by then. If one thing is for certain, Europe is going to undergo radical change, and so let us not run ahead of a situation that we are unable to take stock of as yet. It would be very desirable to introduce a hierarchy into the Commission, i.e. Vice-Presidents, Commissioners and Under-Commissioners. In addition, this would afford Parliament more opportunities to discuss issues with politically responsible members of the Commission rather than officials who read out actual texts that they could just as easily have sent. The Charter does not deserve to be left in a vacuum, with no clear status. In failing to incorporate the text into the Treaty and only subscribing to it in political terms, we are opening the door to major problems of legal interpretation. Hence the Charter must be incorporated into a treaty text as soon as possible. I have this to say to the Heads of Governments: making concessions at the forthcoming summit is not a political defeat but a political triumph: the triumph of the new Europe over the old. Do not allow any shadows to fall over Nice, and let Paris be the City of Light again.

Political group: ELDR
Mr President, I just wanted to observe that the ventilation of this House – by which I mean the whole building – was extreme this week and a very large number of Members have gone down with colds. I would ask you to have the building's ventilation system checked. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE
Madam President, I too support the excellent report by our colleague Mr Morillon, which integrates Atlanticism and Euro-Gaullism magnificently. As someone who is far more of a Euro-Gaullist than Mr Morillon, I concede that he has managed to combine these two elements of European foreign and security policy quite outstandingly. We cannot discuss the issue of European defence as if we were debating the need for a European directive on jam. What is at stake here is the very raison d'être of European integration. I am not the only one who thinks so; many of our citizens share this view, as the opinion polls bear out. The real purpose of European integration is peace and security, both internally and externally. For this reason, the time has come for us to make progress on the European foreign and security policy, and I am not as pessimistic about this as many others in this House. Yes, it is true that our governments have presented a pathetic picture. But if you look at public opinion in the various nations, it is apparent that on the key issues – including the Iraq war – there is far greater unanimity among the nations than among the governments. In my view, we need mechanisms and institutions which do not only capture the nations' common will but actively influence and shape it, for we cannot simply be led by the current mood. We need a responsible, long-term strategy as the basis for a common foreign and security policy. I think the Convention is the final opportunity, in the broad community of fifteen – soon to be twenty-five or thirty – Member States, to achieve a common foreign and security policy. I hope this will be successful. I do not want a core Europe. I do not want a fragmented Europe. Yet if this wider circle of Member States fails to make progress, there must be a development towards a core Europe. However, this means a core Europe which is open to all those who are willing to participate in a common foreign and security policy. Let me make one more thing clear: I believe that we need the Atlantic Alliance. However, as Franz-Josef Strauss, my party's late chairman, once said: ‘The Atlantic Alliance will only have a future if it is based on two equally strong and lasting pillars: an American pillar and a European pillar’. The fact that this European pillar does not exist is not the Americans' fault. It is our fault as Europeans. In the wake of the enlargement which we have agreed today, we will have more citizens than Russia and the USA put together. So it is high time we did something about our foreign and security policy, and that includes spending more and creating the appropriate structures. This does not mean structures of aggression, but structures which actively build peace. Painfully, we failed to do this in advance of the Iraq war, but it has been the European Union's mission since our founding fathers started it up in 1952.

Political group: PPE-DE