Mr President, Commissioner, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, ladies and gentlemen, I would also like to say something about some of this Budget’s foreign policy aspects and will start by responding to Mr Poos, who said that the amendment tabled by the Group of the European People’s Party is unacceptable in terms of the amount that it proposes for Iraq, as a UN mandate is required. Mr Poos has evidently not read this amendment, which takes as its reference value the resolution that this House will be adopting tomorrow, it being a minimum precondition for the European Union’s involvement in Iraq that there should be a UN resolution, that the money should be put in a trust fund controlled by the World Bank and the United Nations, that the Iraqi people should be involved in the processes of democratisation, in the adoption of a constitution and of the establishment of institutions, all of which are now needed, and, above all, that the oil industry should be placed in the hands of the United Nations, in order that it may be a source of funding for the country’s reconstruction. The budget allocation we have proposed is dependent on that condition, and, even if we are talking in terms of one single euro rather than five hundred million of them, it matters that we should get this general concept and these framework conditions right. From that point of view, the Budget today and Parliament’s resolution tomorrow must be seen as very closely interconnected. Secondly, if this leads us to say that we want to get the United Nations more involved, then we must give more attention to it and to our relations with it overall – and that is what Parliament and the Commission are currently working on. I believe it is tomorrow that the Italian Presidency of the Council is signing, in New York, an agreement on crisis management and crisis prevention, but this needs to be mentioned in the Budget. At present, our programmes for the United Nations are all shared out between a whole load of items in the Budget, without there having been a policy debate to set priorities. As an issue in this House, the subject of the United Nations has been dormant in recent years, and the Commission’s new document gives hope that we will now be defining our relationship with the UN in more political terms, even though the Commission has achieved the masterly feat of producing a document of nearly fifty pages that refers not even once to Parliament and the budgetary authority. I think that any redefinition will also necessitate dialogue between the Commission and Parliament. Now for a third comment, addressed to the Council. As we do in every Budget procedure, we have put a number of Budget lines in reserve, as the Council still refuses to provide the information agreed on in the November 2002 agreement between Parliament, the Council and the Commission. This sometimes seems as if we are battering our heads against the Kremlin wall in the way we used to do. We are sure that we will overcome this obstacle and come to an agreement with the Council that will guarantee the public and Parliament greater transparency in future concerning what is going on in the common foreign and security policy.

Political group: PPE-DE