Mr President, as my predecessor, Mr Salafranca Sánchez-Neyra, said, this motion for a resolution has the support of three political groups, the three largest in the House. The motion for a resolution is in line with the statement of the Presidency-in-Office of the Council of last February, which urged compliance with the agreements between the government and the opposition. In this regard we are facing a degree of contradiction because the current Venezuelan Constitution has been drawn up by the party currently in government with a large majority. Nobody obliged the government to include the recall referendum in that Constitution, but it was included. Nobody obliged the government to reach an agreement with the opposition on 29 May 2003, but it was reached. Furthermore, that process is currently being carried out in cooperation with the Organisation of American States, the Carter Centre and also, to a certain extent, the European Union – because we are contributing to the process. At the moment, in line with the statement of the Presidency-in-Office of the Council and in view of events, Parliament, which has expressed its opinion on Venezuela on other occasions, wishes to point out that constitutional rights can be infringed by violation of essential procedural requirements and we believe that in this case there is a violation of essential procedural requirements, since by alleging that there were certain ‘coincidences’ in handwriting, hundreds of thousands of signatures have been annulled. Other procedures could have been used. If it was believed that those signatures were not correct, a system of sampling could have been used, for example, in order to verify whether those hundreds of thousands of signatures were really correct. But what is not acceptable is for them to be annulled in this way without in any way bearing in mind more that the one million signatures needed for a recall referendum would have been collected. We are currently facing a decision by the National Electoral Council, supported by the government, which is intended to deprive Venezuelan citizens of a constitutional right recognised in the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. I believe that the resolution is very clear. We are not trying to inflame passions. Quite the opposite. We are appealing for calm. But we want this process of restoring constitutional normality to conform to the spirit of the agreement of 29 May 2003. In other words, it is not a question of one side imposing its will on the other, but neither is it a question of preventing the exercise of a constitutional right such as the right to call for the recall of a President. And to do so in the way that the National Electoral Council has done, by annulling signatures en masse, makes the exercise of that right impossible. At the moment, it is clear that the Carter Centre for Democracy and the Organisation of American States are negotiating with the Venezuelan Government and with the opposition with a view to seeking a way out of the conflict and we hope that the Commission, as always, will cooperate with Parliament and the Council in the task of reassuring the Venezuelan population and making it possible to put the Venezuelan constitutional process back onto a democratic electoral course.

Political group: PSE