GwendalTsang/DEFT09-parquet huggingface dataset:
Mr President, Commissioner, Mr Lemierre, since its creation, the EBRD has been a shining and undeniable example of the solidarity shown by democratic and developed societies. Indeed, this Bank came into being as a result of the fall of the Berlin Wall and its primary aim is to assist the economies of Eastern European countries, which have since opened up to international competition, to overcome the natural difficulties arising from their embryonic development. Although it is not officially a Community institution, the Bank embodies the entire philosophy of action that characterises the EU’s cohesion and development policies. The forthcoming enlargement of the Union to encompass a significant number of countries from the East will deepen and highlight the importance of the financial and technical aid that the Bank has provided and granted to the candidate countries in the pre-accession phase. The EBRD’s actions must not, however, be cannibalised or cancelled out by the tasks determined and defined for the European Investment Bank. What is needed instead is for these two financial institutions to coordinate and collaborate whilst respecting their autonomy and their different origins, despite the very close financial relationship they enjoy. This should not, incidentally, be too difficult, given that many of their aims are common, as are the characteristics of the economic actors to which this aid must be directed. The recommendations contained in this report, which are aimed at increasing financial and technical aid for small and medium-sized businesses and at prioritising the implementation of financial resources within partnerships, especially in the form of venture capital, and the call for an ongoing commitment to train staff in the bank which can help them better to perform their duties, are extremely positive aspects. The European Parliament should, therefore, support the main conclusions offered by Mr Markov, who is responsible for this own–initiative report. It is also significant that this debate is taking place in the presence of the President of the EBRD, to whom, ultimately, these recommendations are also addressed and on whose abilities the Bank’s success and policies largely depend.

Political group: PSE
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, this report is splendid, and it is even more splendid that we will, in a few minutes, be able to welcome the current Secretary-General of the UN, Kofi Annan. I would of course like to take this moment to recall that there have already been three UN Secretaries-General who hailed from Europe: Trygve Lie, Dag Hammarskjöld and Kurt Waldheim, and that Europe is home to two permanent UN offices, in Geneva and Vienna. This means that we share responsibility to a large extent. Not only do we have claims upon each other, but we also have to take joint action and support each other. The most recent UN Secretary-General to come from Europe, Kurt Waldheim, wrote this in his book ‘Die Antwort’: ‘I have to concede that the UN, notwithstanding all our efforts and our unquestionable sincerity, has not yet managed to break with the political habits and attitudes of past centuries and to come to terms with the new realities with which we have to live. Its capacity for effective action is limited by its own faults. The charge is laid against us that it produces more rhetoric than action, that it is ineffective and is often ignored, and that the system under which every state has a vote allows the developing world to dominate the decision-making process, in that the number of votes bears no relation to the capacity to act.’ The same could also be said of the European Union; both of us are in need of reform. The two of us have a great deal in common. Success is dependent on political will and the determination of the Member States. It depends on acceptance and implementation – of Community law in one case, and of the United Nations Charter in the other. It is dependent upon multilateral cooperation, global responsibility and upon our thinking along Community-oriented lines rather than nationalistically. We can make our contribution if France and England leave the Security Council and the EU joins it; we would thereby be reforming the EU and our own Common Foreign and Security Policy, and forcing through a reform of the UN Security Council.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, as the mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, stated before the United Nations General Assembly, the terrorist attack of 11 September was an attack on the very ideal of free, inclusive, civilised society and on its practice of openness and tolerance. The attack will be unsuccessful only if we are able to enhance these characteristics rather than weaken them. Our initial response, our initial reaction must be to switch off the psychological ‘emergency’ mode and get a grip on our agenda. Therefore, I welcome the commitment to be made at Ghent to proceed with the debates on the euro, enlargement and the political integration of Europe at Laeken and through the Convention. It is in this sense that the fight against terrorism must be seen as part of a series of structural operations. In the area of air safety, for example, we must proceed on two levels: on the one hand, there is an urgent need for a revision of the Regulation establishing the European Air Safety Authority, extending its responsibilities to include accident prevention and – if we can call it that – terrorism prevention; on the other, we need incisive action from the International Civil Aviation Organisation to ensure that the rules we are seeking to adopt for Europe become rules which are binding upon the whole world. Europe must be capable of taking the initiative in this and many other minor areas to express all that potential for peace and democracy which is its strength and must become the strength of the whole world.

Political group: ELDR
Mr President, we support the Commission’s proposal for a temporary increase in the Portuguese processed tomato quota as a means of compensating for the low levels of production in the year 1997-1998 due to bad weather. It should also be noted that this additional sum does not even compensate for the whole potential production in normal weather conditions; it merely mitigates the loss that has been mentioned, which was incurred when the Member States distributed the quotas. Concerning the proposals put forward in the report, we also feel that there needs to be reform, given that the current situation has harmful effects – as experience has already shown – but we must bear in mind that any reform will still have to take the results of the current year into account and the potential levels of production in Portugal under normal weather conditions. We therefore think that it is more sensible to increase and improve the current system for calculating quotas with increases in line with the total amounts of production aid and not to move towards a system of guarantee thresholds that could penalise all farmers and not just those who exceed their quotas.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, I am especially glad that these programmes will guarantee the financial stability of organisations such as Youth Forum, Jeunesse, the European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages and Mercator information and documentation centres amongst many others. Youth Forum and Jeunesse fulfil an important role in empowering and engaging young people in civil society, which is so important. They also provide young people with an environment to learn democratic decision-making, intercultural understanding and self-motivated learning. Likewise the European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages and Mercator have both played, and will continue to play, an important role in safeguarding and promoting minority languages in the European Union. Their presence and work is especially needed now that 10 new countries will join the Union and further enhance the number of existing minority languages. There are 40 million minority-language speakers now. Six million other people speaking minority languages will join. It is crucial that the speakers of these languages enjoy the same rights and possibilities that have been available to everyone else. I welcome also the measures to increase transparency in the decisions to allocate grants to organisations and also the user-friendliness of the grant application process which at the moment is far too cumbersome. Nevertheless I regret that in the case of youth NGOs the principle of degressivity remains in the common position, which will mean that the reduction of their funds from the third year onwards will make things rather difficult for them. Guaranteeing a regular budget for these NGOs would be the best way to support their activities and increase their effectiveness in future. I very much hope that these excellent reports will be endorsed by a substantial majority in Parliament.

Political group: Verts-ALE
I warmly thank Mrs Carrilho, my friend and colleague. I did this report in the last parliament. But she has more than ably taken on and developed the work that I and Mr Deva have been involved in the past and I warmly thank and congratulate her on her work. I have three points that I want to make. Firstly, it is important to say to the Commission that we in Parliament, having established this budget line, have adopted some important principles that we want to see adhered to in the way that it is implemented, strengthening our commitment to non-refoulement. There have been instances in the past where we could have been accused of complicity with forced return: it is absolutely illegal in international law and the Commission must be vigilant on that. We want to ensure that this budget line is used creatively, including not just visible support for camps, clean water and so on, but the less visible help that is so critical in refugee situations including psycho-social support and counselling, support on reproductive health issues and indeed, support for refugees with disabilities. I should like to associate myself with the points made by Mrs Gill on comitology where that is particularly damaging to the delivery of this budget line. I suspect Commissioner Patten will agree with that point. Secondly, I should like to reiterate to Commissioner Patten that the fact that the Commission brought forward no money for Latin America in their preliminary budget is bizarre particularly when 2.1 million displaced people exist in Colombia. He is doing a lot of very good work in terms of emergency assistance there, but the safe and protected return of internally displaced people in that country is crucial and it is bizarre that they do not include that in their plans. Finally, Commissioner Patten himself told us in Parliament when he brought forward the 12-month extension that it would not be late again; he listened to our views and yet the situation has arisen again. It is important that we be seen to ensure that the reform is on track, and that means these issues being dealt with much further in advance than we are now once again seeing. I guess he is a little embarrassed by having to come at this late stage once again here today.

Political group: PSE
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, five years ago, in 1997, the Rio + 5 meeting took place in New York. Unfortunately, the delegation representing the European Parliament on that occasion was very small. I was honoured to be one of its members. At the time, the developing countries went as far as to push for the term 'sustainable development' to be omitted from the final declaration and merely for the phrase 'sustainable economic growth' to be used instead. I understand this position in some ways, because poverty is of course the key issue for the developing countries. When we talk about environmental protection, what we say sometimes lacks credibility. Nonetheless, as the EU, we should keep both aspects – economic and social development, but also environmental protection – in mind, for they are of course connected. For example, the World Bank calculates that if we fail to act on the issue of climate protection, there will be a 1% – 2% drop in GDP in the industrialised countries in the coming years as a result of climate change, but a 10% fall in GDP in the developing countries. This makes it clear that the environment and social and economic development cannot be played off against each other, but are inter-linked. However – and the developing countries are right in this respect – we must demonstrate that it is possible to organise economic growth and prosperity without doing so at the expense of the environment. In the climate process, for example, we must thus reduce our own emissions before we can impose any obligations on the developing countries. I therefore believe that the time has come to practise what we have always preached and actually implement, in the European Union, the measures which we have consistently called for in our resolutions. There is a great deal of room to criticise the Commission's proposals, for example on emissions trading, and they can certainly be improved upon, but we must pursue this basic approach. We must now act locally if we are to convince the developing countries that sustainable development is possible.

Political group: PPE-DE
I voted for Mr Ferber’s report on our budget for 2001, but I cannot let this opportunity pass without protesting in the strongest terms against what can only be described as the blackmail practised against certain categories of officials, particular more junior ones, so that they find themselves ‘voluntarily compelled’ to transfer from Luxembourg to Brussels, on the pretext that they are in Brussels or Strasbourg ‘en mission’, i.e. on business, for more than 50 working days per year. The European Parliament now has three places of work: Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg. This was agreed by the Heads of State and Government at their summit in Edinburgh years ago. We have to live with this, and with its financial consequences, which are not so great, and which are certainly justified by avoiding unhealthy centralisation in Brussels, as is unfortunately practised by a good third of the present Members of the European Parliament. We are now suffering from an example of this centralisation at the hands of certain Green Members, who prevented a number of important votes on the Friday of the April Strasbourg part-session, because the quorum of one third of the Members present was not established. I have been a Member of this Parliament since 1965, with a break between 1974 and 1989, so I have 20 years’ of attendance behind me, during which time I was present at every Friday sitting in Strasbourg. The flimsy arguments put forward by those who want to reduce the European Parliament’s five-day week in Strasbourg to four days, and who would also prefer not to turn up here on Mondays, are part of their salami tactics, which are obviously aimed at sabotaging Parliament’s seat in Strasbourg for 12 sittings each year, not to mention their objective of transferring the offices of the Secretariat from Luxembourg to Brussels. The Bureau now intends to present a working paper by a British Vice-President which proposes moving all the services and Directorates-General from Luxembourg to Brussels. The idea is to keep at most the specialist services such as the printing and translating services in Luxembourg. This cannot and will not happen. It would be a clear infringement of the letter and the spirit of the decisions made by the Heads of State and Government about Parliament’s places of work, and this needs to be said here in the clearest possible terms. I have a word of warning for those people who are using these salami tactics against Strasbourg and Brussels. We will thwart your highly undemocratic machinations against democratically reached decisions about Parliament’s places of work and about the calendar of meetings – because we have right on our side. - Katiforis report (A5-0134/2000)

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, I am sure that you and the whole House will join me in expressing our distress and condolences with regard to the 21 Albanians who lost their lives when their boat was shipwrecked recently near Vlora, off the Albanian coast. As we rightly strive to develop common European policies for asylum and, in parallel, common policies for Europe for legal immigration, this tragedy and other similar ones have drawn yet further attention to the need for the EU to be constantly aware of the less prosperous states around it and to do ever more to support those countries, of which Albania is just one example.

Political group: PSE
Whilst I understand many of the rapporteur’s aims to give the directive greater legal strength – and thereby avoid seeing the courts reject its implementation – I believe that the rapporteur has ultimately compromised the directive’s public health objectives. I find this intolerable. I therefore prefer the European Commission’s original position to that produced by the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market. Amendment No 26, which I support, seeks to prevent this excessive weakening of public health protection.

Political group: PPE-DE
Madam President, President-in-Office of the Council, Commissioners, the way speaking time is organised is so mischievous and bizarre that I now have to speak again about transport problems and agencies. Having said that, I very much support what my colleague Mr Hatzidakis has said, namely that we must keep the lines as they were in the preliminary draft budget because there are no savings to be made on these policies for the present. I would like to take the opportunity, Commissioner, to respond to the problem of the policy of providing information to European Union citizens. This subject will really be one of the most important in the years ahead. You may know that several of us have tabled amendments to restore the lines to what they were last year. The most important thing, however, is that all institutional communication should get as close to ordinary citizens as possible. What worries me the most about the present communications policy is that we do not have the necessary tools to reach those who are going to vote. The citizen’s ignorance of the present machinery and the institutions as they will be is quite appalling. You have the resources, Commissioner, but for goodness sake let us ensure that they go to the heart of our present-day society. That would be a great step forward for the democratic future of our Union.

Political group: PSE
Mr President, I have taken the floor simply to tell you that I have been in contact with Mr Murphy, the rapporteur of this report, and we have agreed that it would be better to proceed to the vote without debating the report.

Political group: PSE
Madam President, Commissioner, I welcome your second declaration – that the Commission is asking the ECJ to clarify the procedural aspects of budget monitoring – very warmly. The euro – let us admit it for once – has achieved far greater stability in the five years that we can look back on than the Deutschmark did. On the other hand, the euro is a difficult currency, for it runs alongside not one but fifteen national finance and economic policies, has an ‘open-door’ policy, and is still a young currency. It is therefore especially important to enforce Article 104 of the Treaty and the associated Stability Pact rigorously, and the eight countries and their citizens who have done their homework have a right to expect this. That is why the Commission is acting properly by clarifying these rights and enforcing budget discipline. That in itself serves to boost confidence in this new currency. We still have a lot of work ahead of us. Thank you for this decision.

Political group: PPE-DE
Mr President, the task of Ombudsman demands both great patience and considerable optimism in terms of getting the EU institutions to comply with basic demands concerning the Rule of Law and democratic accountability. Mr Söderman has carried out his task with infinite patience, particularly in regard to the Commission which has shown no understanding of elementary administrative culture. It is difficult to sustain optimism, however. I do not want to suggest that Mr Söderman has given up, but the fact that the EU’s competent and patient Ombudsman has chosen to retire early is a signal that the Commission’s absolute power is too overwhelming. Absolute power does not only result in passivity; it is revealed in the active opposition to the Ombudsman’s efforts to introduce the Nordic countries’ administrative culture into the institutions of the EU. A couple of examples: freedom of expression is practised as the freedom to employ several hundred million euro on spreading EU propaganda, in conjunction with the ruthless censorship of critical voices. One has only to read about the latest victim of the arrogance of power. Her name is Marta Andreasen. Data protection is used not to protect citizens’ private lives but to secure the Commission’s monopoly on knowledge. The Ombudsman’s right to gather uncensored information is sabotaged outright by the Commission. I would take the liberty of referring to the Ombudsman’s brilliant answer to the Commission’s scandalous statement of 6 March of this year, a statement characterised by the Ombudsman in terms of the negative points of view and false assumptions it contained. There is a long way to go. With his latest report, Mr Söderman deserves a big thank-you for having tried to make the way shorter, but his departure gives new topicality to the issue of whether we shall ever reach the end of the road or only remain at the start of it. Is the EU system, characterised as it is by absolute power, simply resistant to the Rule of Law and democratic accountability? There are an appallingly large number of witnesses to the fact that the answer might be in the affirmative.

Political group: GUE-NGL
Mr President, I will begin by presenting the apologies of Mrs Randzio-Plath, who is unable to be present. The Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs will be voting on this question of extension this evening under the simplified procedure, Article 158 (1), so the outcome should be known quickly. I think we will in fact have an agreement, but the vote takes place this evening.

Political group: GUE-NGL