Mr President, Commissioner Lamy deserves our gratitude for referring to the much-needed institutional reinforcement of the role of the European Parliament in European trade policy. I wish to ask you Madam President-in-Office of the Council, whether you can support this position when you are assembling your papers for the forthcoming Inter-Governmental Conference and, firstly, for the Convention for which we are all striving? It is there that the breakthrough should at last occur, so that the European Parliament can draw even in institutional terms with the American Senate and House of Representatives. In the next few years, the WTO will, through the imminent accession of China and Taiwan – both of which have long been important trading partners of Europe – and the eventual accession of Russia, gain a global dimension, giving it an even greater worldwide representative role and presenting it with new challenges. To achieve this, it will have to adapt its structures and change the way it works. With Qatar, there is the additional factor that we must make a start and genuinely involve all the developing countries, not only the representatives of the least developed, in the negotiations. The technical aid which the EU and the other industrialised countries are called upon to provide is crucial for these countries' future real involvement in the decision-making process. The WTO must, however, also increase its efficiency despite these changes and become more transparent and more readily understood by the world's citizens. How will the WTO harmonise its new, strengthened universality with the need to become even more efficient and make markets more open? Our resolution attempts to reconcile these two requirements, although surely incompletely as yet. We Europeans must contribute our environmental legislation, our regulations on food safety, our multifunctional agriculture and our social security legislation as expressions of a tangible European reality. Now, some weeks after 11 September, it is particularly important, partly as a response to terrorism, that we, the EU and, particularly, the European Parliament, continue without distraction on our way towards greater openness and democracy in the WTO and resolutely set about the necessary reforms. We need to promote fair and freer world trade rather than seal ourselves off by means of protectionism and fall back upon national markets. We must also strive to realise soon the central proposition of the European Parliament – the establishment of an effective parliamentary assembly for the WTO, to be the world's mouthpiece in trading matters. We therefore need representatives of the American Congress in Doha as well. We are relying on the parliaments of the industrialised states, of the emergent countries and of all the developing countries. May we ask, Madam President-in-Office of the Council, if you, at the end of your presidency of the Council, could give your support to this proposal, which we must implement as soon as possible? We support Commissioner Lamy's efforts at using our cooperative structures to involve Africa in particular – Africa, that continent which is largely forgotten by world trade – more intensively in dialogue on the subject of a parliamentary assembly. Our seminar on 12 April was the first example of a successful conference on trade, democracy and development to involve our friends from Africa alongside the representatives of the industrialised countries in America, Europe and Asia. Technical support from the Commission and our parliamentary budget played an important part in this.

Political group: PPE-DE