Debate: One year after Morocco and QatarGate – stocktaking of measures to strengthen transparency and accountability in the European institutions
Date: WEDNESDAY, 13 DECEMBER 2023
Speaker: Věra Jourová
Language: EN

I think that also what was heard here today several times was that we were all shocked. What happened a year ago was a reputational blow not only to this House, but to the EU as such. I heard from many, many voices that there is something rotten in Brussels, not even in Strasbourg. So the people think that this is the problem of the EU in general. And we have to be extremely careful because trust in democracy and in the institutions goes down in almost all our Member States. And it also applies to the EU and EU institutions. We have to be careful because we are six months ahead of the elections, and we should accelerate all our actions to convince the people that we are trustworthy and that there should be a vote cast in the European elections. What I hear from many, many citizens – I am in very frequent contact with people who have nothing in common with politics or with the EU – what I hear in the Czech pubs, and not only in the Czech pubs, what the people are very furious about is corruption and undeserved, unexplainable privileges of the politicians. And I think that this is something we have to address. We will try to address it by the interinstitutional ethics body. I will come to it in a minute because I feel the duty to reply to some of the questions also on that. But what I heard in this debate, what we need is more transparency and a strong rulebook – not in the sense of leaves of paper. Madam Bischoff said it clearly: what matters is the implementation, whether the rules are taken seriously and implemented in real life. We need prudent application of our interinstitutional transparency register. We need to apply in full the ethical and disciplinary rules in individual institutions. Of course, for the European Parliament, it’s important to pay sufficient or strong attention to President Metsola’s plan. What we have in the field of transparency in our legislation: yesterday we adopted the Defence of Democracy package. This is about transparency. The regulation on political advertising, which will be partly already in force before the European elections. This is mainly about transparency, so that the people are not manipulated by hidden methods online. We proposed an anti-corruption package. It’s hanging in the legislative process. So I think that we are doing a lot of things. We can say that Qatargate was the failure of several individuals, with a question mark. It has to be investigated. It’s the judge who has to say the last word. But besides the individuals, I think that we are doing the right thing to try to fill the loopholes in the system. And next to the systemic measures, there is also the individual positioning of each of us. And some of you also mentioned that ethical standards and ethical behaviour starts with each of us individually. On the ethics body, as Mr Freund knows, we are progressing quite well. We would like to set up the institution well before the elections. We seriously deal with the European Parliament’s request to do more. We take seriously the resolution from the summer, where you insist on inclusion of more competences than what we proposed as the Commission. I insist that the body must not duplicate competences. We need a legally sound and functional body, bringing necessary added value. And efficiency of the body is one of the parameters we have to deal with. So we have an agreement now that we will work in parallel on the main road for the ethics body in line with what Commission proposed, but at the same time try to design the additional competences for the institutions which might like to use the ethics body for something more, which is mainly the case of the European Parliament. So the work is in full swing now. The last comment is to react to one of the speakers, Madam Silvia Sardone. I am not used to spreading rumours further on when I react on something, but I have to react. What she said – it’s a pity she’s not here – about how much EU money has supported terrorism? Zero. I have to say here: EU money is not supporting terrorists, Islamists nor extremists. It has to be said very clearly. There were cases in the past when we found out that some money went to Islamist groups. We did not disclose it ex-ante, through the ex-ante control of the projects. We found it out during the project and, believe me, it was a matter of hours when we stopped the funding and we requested the money to be returned back to the European budget. So I wanted to react to that because we have to use a strong voice when we hear very clear and verifiable lies about the EU and the work we are doing.