Mr President, the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market has been dealing with this issue since the beginning of 2002. We were responding to several Commission communications which raised the problem of the shortcomings in Community regulations. I remember how, in conversation with a Spanish national legislator – a very experienced one, by the way – he told me that nobody could understand Community directives. We do so much work on them and so many people are involved in their production: the Council, the Commission, the European Parliament and so many others, that in the end we have a text which could be described as a ‘camel’, in other words, a horse designed by a committee. And that is the real situation. While we must recognise that the regulation is a little more appropriate, the directive, on the other hand, is a real disaster. The Commission’s natural concern was of course to improve this situation, a concern which the Council and Parliament also share. Above all at a time when Parliament is increasing its legislative powers, it makes no sense for us to continue with this procedure for producing legislation. At the same time, however, we in the Committee on Legal Affairs realised that, in order for the Commission's proposals to come to fruition, it would be necessary to provide a constitutional framework suited to this issue. We raised this within the first points of the report, and then the Committee on Constitutional Affairs, which had decided to produce a series of reports after debating the issue with the Committee on Legal Affairs, realised the importance of the issue in terms of Parliament’s institutional role and, on a very sound basis, accepted the report. Meanwhile, we insisted on our conviction – and that of the Committee on Constitutional Affairs as well – that it was necessary to reach an interinstitutional agreement between the three institutions in order to prevent the respective institutions from being deprived of their powers. I believe that the result of this exercise – during which the two different committees of Parliament, Legal Affairs and Constitutional Affairs, have dealt with the issue – has been positive. I believe that the interinstitutional agreement reached is a good agreement and I would like to congratulate my colleague, Mrs Frassoni, on the work of the Committee on Constitutional Affairs, on the work she herself has done and also the good work done by President Gargani and many members of that interinstitutional working group – Mr Swoboda and Mr Clegg – and we in the Committee on Legal Affairs are happy with the result. This report for which I am rapporteur was approved by the Committee on Legal Affairs before the interinstitutional agreement had been reached. We therefore proposed a series of recommendations to the interinstitutional group on it. Since the agreement has now been reached – and I believe that to a large extent our objectives have been achieved – I believe that the best option is for the report to be returned to the Committee on Legal Affairs so that we can, taking account of the actions included in the interinstitutional agreement, move forward on that basis. I would insist, of course – and here I agree with Mrs Frassoni – that we must deal with the problems of self-regulation and co-regulation. Because we are too happy to talk about civil society and then, when we talk about civil society here in the European Parliament and the European Union, we invite representatives from certain organisations, which somebody or other tells us are representative. But in reality, in democratic systems, civil society is expressed by means of the electoral process. The electoral process provides civil society with a formal means of expression, and the result of that electoral process is the legislative bodies, and it is they who have to adapt the general regulations. The problem with self-regulation and co-regulation is that they represent a step backwards; they mean returning to the Middle Ages, when certain sectors produced rules which bound everybody. In modern societies, these rules must come from society as a whole, by means of elected bodies, elected through perfectly formalised and guaranteed processes, which in this case means the European Parliament, the Council – insofar as the Council is made up of governments with elected leaders answerable to their national Parliaments – and also the Commission, insofar as it is elected by the Council and by the European Parliament. I therefore have the impression that the interinstitutional agreement has placed certain restrictions, but we in this Parliament must continue to insist on the need, on the one hand, to improve the quality of Community legislation and, on the other, not to throw the baby out with the bathwater and not to give up the progress made in our Europe through the development of the liberal and democratic State, which ensures that decisions are made by legislative bodies elected by popular will.

Political group: PSE