Mr President, the European Union’s environmental policy is ambitious and good in several areas. Implementing it successfully is, however, almost impossible without the support of our own citizens. A precondition for obtaining the support of our citizens is that our environmental work is transparent. This is the aim of the proposed directive under discussion today. Commissioner Wallström said when the proposal first underwent its first reading over a year ago that if we are to achieve the conditions required for sustainable development, we have to start by making our national environmental policy the centre of attention. Thus Commissioner Wallström is quite correctly linking this directive to the long and vitally, in the literal sense, important process which began in Rio in 1992, ten years ago next week. Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development concerns the participation of citizens and the Aarhus Convention is a significant step towards putting that principle into practice. As well as being signed by the Community, the Aarhus Convention has been signed by all fifteen Member States, but the Community has not yet managed to progress to ratification as the existing legislation does not yet comply with the Convention. The directive being proposed is the first pillar in ratifying the Aarhus Convention. The second pillar concerns public participation and Parliament will be able to start the second reading in the near future, as at the start of tomorrow’s session it will be announced that the Council’s common position has finally been received. This being the case, today I submitted a draft recommendation concerning the second reading of the second pillar to the secretariat of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy. The third pillar aiming at ratifying the Aarhus Convention concerns access to justice and a proposal regarding this is currently being prepared by the Commission. In addition, the rules of the Union’s institutions must also be checked to ensure they conform to the Aarhus Convention. The Commission has promised that during June it will provide information on actions that are still required and a more precise timetable for these. It is hoped that the Commission will be able to confirm this today. When I was drafting the recommendation for a second reading to be discussed today, I took into account the fact that in the first reading Parliament was exceptionally unanimous and accepted all the amendments proposed. Thus the recommendation for second reading will in practice repeat everything that Parliament accepted on the first reading which has not yet been included in the Council’s common position. The Council has also made a number of important proposals worthy of support, among which I would especially mention the Council’s definition of a public authority, which is an improved adaptation of the wording proposed by Parliament, as well as the Council’s adaptation of the point concerning access to justice. The Council also proposes that historical documents, in other words documents received or created before the directive has entered into force be made electronically available, for example on the Internet at the discretion of the authority in question. I also recommend that this should be approved. The Council has not, however, taken into account Parliament’s proposal on reducing the time-limit within which authorities must respond from one month to two weeks. The recommendation includes a compromise proposal, which has been copied from an act based on Article 255 of the Treaty of Rome, on access to information held by the Union’s institutions, which was accepted after the first reading of this directive proposal. As such, the compromise proposes that a response should be given within 15 working days, that is, at least three weeks, which can be doubled where there is a justification. After the first reading, our British colleagues in the main put forward a concern about the fate of the sale of commercial information by authorities. I am convinced that weather services and map information do not even fall within the scope of this directive and even if they did, they would be protected in a carefully considered list of exceptions. However, having heard about this concern, the committee decided to remove part of item 2 of the article that deals with charging. In my opinion this was a rushed gesture, and I did not see it as the best way of resolving the matter. To rectify this situation, the , the Liberals and the Group have jointly tabled Amendment No 48 to emphasise the general principle that the information should be free of charge. There is nothing wrong with the amendment in itself. I support it, but in my view the original amendment rejected by the committee was better, as this new version is unlikely to delight the British either. The directive on public access to environmental information is intended to be implemented before the end of the current year. The second reading of the second pillar of the Aarhus Convention will probably be ready before Parliament’s summer recess and it is likely that we will receive information from the Commission on the timetable for the third pillar and other necessary action within the same time frame. The Aarhus Convention has thus progressed many steps towards ratification and implementation in the European Union.

Political group: PPE-DE