Debate: Following up on measures requested by Parliament to strengthen the integrity of European institutions
Date: MONDAY, 13 FEBRUARY 2023
Speaker: Věra Jourová
Language: EN

What we see in many different researches and data and different own observations is that the source of the decline or lack of trust from the sight of the citizens is always either abuse of power and/or corruption and/or a lack of communication or direct lying to people.  I regret to say that we must be doing something wrong because the trust of the citizens is declining in almost all the Member States. In some Member States around or up to 40 % of people are giving us the report that they think that the democracy does not work for them.  When we should have stronger democracy and stronger trust of the people in the institutions than now in the time of deep crisis. We already saw it in the pandemic time that we needed the trust of people. And now in the time of war, there is even a stronger demand for the trust of people.  That’s why I myself was very shocked when the scandal appeared last year. Because what we all know, the people do not differentiate as to whether it is the European Parliament, the Commission or the Council. They just think there is something rotten in Brussels or the EU as such is wrong.  And it’s very dangerous. And it’s unfair because the reputation of the EU institutions, which was built over many years, can be very much devastated by only one scandal.  I said many times in public speeches or to media that I believe that this very scandal is the failure of several individual people. But this is not enough to say that. We have to look into the system, whether it works. And I don’t believe that we can introduce a system which will discourage those who will want to steal from doing that. Sorry for being that blunt.  But I believe we have loopholes in the system. We can increase transparency. We can increase the anti-corruption measures. We can increase many different measures – some of them are also presented by President Metsola – to make the system more robust and more trustworthy. That’s why we are discussing today, and I heard from many of you, that you also feel that it’s our obligation to look into the system and to improve it.  The Commission is now working on four things, which will come soon. And I think that we will be discussing the systemic changes which the Commission will propose over the rest of this year at least.  One of them is the work on the creation of the inter-institutional ethics body. I believe that we need the body, which will be pragmatic and meaningful, which will create the layer on which we need something, something which will connect the EU institutions by working on the common standards and many other things. I will be more detailed in explaining that tomorrow because we have a special plenary debate about that. We will be discussing the format and the scope of the ethics body with, I think, seven EU institutions, so it should not be only the Commission, Parliament and the Council. More about it tomorrow.  We will also propose the revision of the transparency rules. Some of you spoke about it here. I think you remember the heavy debate we had 2020 and 2021 about how to increase transparency in the work of the Commission, Parliament and the Council. I heard a lot about the freedom of the mandate of the Members of the European Parliament. Indeed, we have to recognise fully the autonomy and specificity of each institution but, at the same time, I think that there is quite a bit of room for improvement of the transparency and to do it without damaging the efficiency of our work.  The last two things we are working on are the anti-corruption strategy, where we should cover the EU institutions, and the defence of democracy package, which will focus on foreign interference – it will be connected with the topic which Commissioner Hahn before me covered here and where you had the discussion about the need to increase the transparency of foreign financing.  So I wanted to complement what I said at the beginning to be now more concrete on ethics body, more tomorrow and on all the other things. I am very much looking forward to cooperation with Parliament because what I felt here in this room today is that there is a very strong political will to improve the system.