Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I am grateful for the good cooperation over the recent weeks; I would particularly like to thank the secretariat of our Committee on Citizens' Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs for their support, without which my report could not have been processed on time. As the Commissioner has already mentioned, we are working to a very tight timetable, as the continued funding of many European institutions, and the support for non-governmental organisations, associations, trade unions and educational institutions in the next financial year cannot be secured without passing a legal act. Following the introduction of activity-based budgeting in accordance with the new Financial Regulation, these institutions need a legal basis. Although these institutions’ payments were previously covered by the A 30 line, these can, in future, no longer be made from the administrative part of the Commission’s budget. A legal basis is needed to ensure that the payments can be made. Such is the purely technical background to my report, and I do of course fully agree with the Commission that adaptation is an important primary concern. I am obliged to the Commissioner for his wide-ranging appreciation of my report, but I nevertheless want to contradict him on one point. We take the view that technical adaptation would not go far enough. The European Union has great challenges ahead of it, the first being the enlargement on 1 May 2004, and the poor turnout in the accession countries’ referendums has reinforced my view that more initiatives are needed if we are to press on with European integration. The second challenge is the debate on the new constitution and the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which also presents us with new challenges, and, last but not least, there is the harmonisation of the European legal area, in relation to which I will just mention the debate about the European Arrest Warrant. My aim has therefore been to help reduce the democratic deficit and develop a coherent picture of the concept of European citizenship and civic participation, and this has also been the overall motif of the report. So I particularly regret the fact that the Commission has not mentioned, and will not endorse, my Amendment 35, since I believe it to be very necessary that we should start to cooperate better with the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission, which brings structure to constitutional case law. There is an urgent need for the database to be expanded in order to give us better access to case law in European constitutional law. I also think it very important to support the ‘Agora’ website, thereby developing a virtual forum in which legislators at national and European level can consult each other. The same is true of the network for the training and further education of judges and public prosecutors. If we are to talk in terms of a European arrest warrant, then judges and public prosecutors urgently need more knowledge of European lawmaking. Right across Europe, we need better interaction between judges and public prosecutors. Although the Commission’s report is the ambitious essay that I would expect it to be, I also note deficiencies in the way it is set out. These led us to pay close attention to the simplification of procedures, to the reduction of red tape, and to customer-friendly access to European support grants. One proposal, therefore, envisages access as a two-stage procedure, which would mean that the purely formal aspects would be scrutinised first, followed at the second stage by examination of the content. That would simplify the examination overall and make for speedier decisions for the non-governmental organisations in question. We also want more transparency in the way Europe provides support. If a non-governmental organisation is in receipt of grants from Europe, it should also make that clear. Public access to the results of the work must also be ensured. For my final point, I would now like to turn to the question of earmarking, which has been a cause of great controversy in this House. In the first draft of my report I argued in favour of doing away with earmarking, but was obliged to take note of the fact that Parliament took a different view. I have come to share the view of many Members that we have to have a serious dialogue with the Commission, and that this will happen after 2004. Although I welcome the offer to continue earmarking after 2004, how, then – to take one example – is the call for proposals in relation to the Info-Points and in other areas to be implemented in 2005? We can see a lot of question marks hanging over this, and I would like to have a dialogue with the Commission about it. This has led me to refrain from withdrawing the amendment, which I would prefer us to vote on today. I also think there has to be some fundamental rethinking of the issue of the executive agency and its objectives.

Political group: Verts-ALE