draftsman of the opinion of the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market. – Mr President, speaking both as a member of the Committee on Legal Affairs and on behalf of my own group, I, too, very much welcome this. I am speaking today on behalf of our Co-President, Mrs Hautala, who is unable to be here this evening. It is her opinion in particular that I want to draw attention to as I speak tonight. We very much welcome the Ombudsman's report. We particularly welcome the reforms and changes which we believe ought to be and, Commission-willing, will be introduced as a result of this report. After all, access to documentation is a fundamental civil right and no documentation is more important to a candidate than documentation in relation to examinations. The core of the Ombudsman's report is the fact that candidates for Community recruitment are entitled, if they so request, to see their examination scripts. We also want to make a particular point about minority languages. There is a great difficulty about examining people in a different language. I have had to do it myself from time to time, looking at scripts in Italian or German as a native English – or at least a kind of English – speaker. The difficulty is resolved by translation, but then we must be sure that the quality of translation is high and that the candidate can check that what was written in the original language is what appears in the paper as examined. If there are inconsistencies it must be open to the candidate to draw attention to them. We are glad that the Commission is going to do this. Not only the Commission but the other institutions and bodies of the Community ought to comply with the Ombudsman's recommendations, even in the case of recruitment procedures which have already been initiated. It is regrettable that the Commission agreed to apply the Ombudsman's recommendation only for recruitment procedures launched after June 2000. We believe that the institutions of the Community should conduct their staff recruitment procedures, and indeed all recruitment procedures, with a maximum of openness and transparency in order to avoid the suspicion of partiality, injustice and administrative incompetence. We must also make sure that the procedures encourage the appointment of women to salary groups, including the highest salary groups in which they are under-represented. We would also like to draw attention to the point about temporary and auxiliary posts in the institutions, offices and bodies of the Community and the Union. These should be published in the Official Journal and in the press and on the Internet to guarantee a genuine sense of competition. Senior officials must ensure that merit is rewarded and that all vacant posts, even the most senior ones, should be published in the Official Journal and on the Internet. Further, persons employed in the private offices of members of the Commission must be obliged to take part in a general selection procedure before they can take up any other vacant post in the institution in question. We note, for example, that Mr Prodi's former chef de cabinet was transferred to another post in the Commission hierarchy. We hope that he will see that he should resign when the mandate of the current Commission finishes, since he has never passed a Commission competition at all. It is a byword throughout the Union that it is difficult to get into jobs unless you are well connected. We must do all that we can to make that byword not merely false, but seen to be false.

Political group: Verts-ALE