Mr President, before I start, I and my group would like to join our fellow Members in paying tribute to Marco Biagi; after Ezio Tarantelli and Massimo D’Antona, he is the third senior law expert to have been killed in recent years. These men were searching for ways to strengthen and reinvigorate social dialogue and cohesion: it is efforts such as these that are now threatening terrorism and I feel that it is imperative that we do not lose sight of that in our debate on Barcelona today. The Barcelona European Council has confirmed something which my group believes has been a problem for some time: the inability of this kind of meeting to address major issues and produce coherent general guidelines. I refer, for instance, to the extraordinary omission to talk about Iraq and the negligible attention afforded to the strategy for sustainable development. On the other hand, there is a growing desire to address issues which are not the direct responsibility of the European Council such as how many computers schools in the European Union should have for their pupils to use in the coming years. This is a serious situation, not least in that it makes things even more confusing for the citizens: the citizens cannot distinguish between the parts of the conclusions that will be transformed into decisions at national level, the parts intended to be a practical guideline for the Union institutions, particularly for the Council of Ministers, and the parts which, on the other hand, are merely rhetoric and will be duly overlooked at the Summit or during the next Presidency. I have to say that we too were misled when we rejoiced at Gothenburg that the penny had at last dropped that there can be no sustainable approach to development and prosperity which is not integrated, which does not take the social and environmental factors into account along with economic factors. Apart from the small section on sustainable development, there is only one mention of the environment in the conclusions. It is my conviction that, despite the constructive atmosphere and spirit of Barcelona, there was no overall vision of the direction the economic reforms should take if we are to achieve the Lisbon and Gothenburg objectives. In my opinion, the 500 000 protesters were perfectly aware of this. I would now like to focus briefly on the issue of liberalisation, for I wish we could, for once, free ourselves from a standard ideology and realise that, at this point in time, the problems have yet to be resolved. The abuse of a dominant position and the distortion of the market in favour of nuclear energy are currently our main problems. Indeed, we are quite aware that public companies such as EDF, EON and RVE are distorting the market by using the funds set aside for nuclear waste management and the dismantling of nuclear power stations to acquire other European companies. Moreover, the increase of interconnections between Spain and France to 10% will do nothing at all to change the dominant positions of Endesa and Iberdrola, and so hardly anything will change for consumers. I would like to end by putting two specific questions to Prime Minister Aznar, if he is listening, on the issue of the Middle East. I would like to know why the motion for a resolution on the Middle East contained a reference to the protocol to the Fourth Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians in wartime and why this reference was not present in the final version of these conclusions. I would like to know the reason for this and I am sure that the matter is of interest to Parliament as a whole.

Political group: Verts-ALE