MEPs unite to demand IGC role

Date: 14/03/1996

By Rory Watson

FRENCH Socialist Euro MP Elisabeth Guigou this week challenged EU leaders to vote in favour of closely involving the European Parliament in the Intergovernmental Conference at their summit in Turin.

The former French European affairs minister advanced the idea as a way of overcoming steadfast opposition from the UK and France to the presence of MEPs as observers at the negotiating table.

“The arguments of the two member states do not stand up. If they remain stubborn, then the Italian presidency should call for a vote at the Turin European Council. There are precedents. There was a vote at the Milan Council in 1985 and again at the Strasbourg Council in 1989,” said Guigou.

She insisted parliamentary involvement was not designed to usurp national governments, but was necessary in order to defend EU priorities set by MEPs and to ensure that the public was kept informed about the negotiations.

Moves to keep the Parliament at arm's length were angrily condemned across the political spectrum yesterday (13 March) as MEPs in Strasbourg set out their vision of a restyled Union.

Socialist group leader Pauline Green warned that the MEPs' absence would confirm in the minds of doubters that the EU was neither about them nor for them. Liberal group leader Gijs de Vries complained: “This reinforces the image of the Union as a remote, inaccessible organisation.”

As MEPs set out their IGC stall, former Danish Prime Minister and Christian Democrat MEP Poul Schlüter suggested three fundamental principles should guide the negotiations. He called for far-reaching adjustments in the EU's institutions, the strengthening of the common foreign and security policy, and the introduction of greater democracy and efficiency in EU decision-making.

Dutch Liberal MEP Laurens Brinkhorst, the Parliament's rapporteur on next year's Union budget, insisted that the IGC could not ignore the future financing of EU policies and had to end the anomaly which allowed agricultural spending to escape parliamentary control.

“The current artificial distinction of compulsory and non-compulsory spending stands in the way of democracy. It is totally unacceptable at the end of the 20th century that half of the budget is not controlled by any democratic organ,” he said.

MEPs' demands are set out in a lengthy 19-page resolution prepared by Belgian Socialist member Raymonde Dury and her Dutch Christian Democrat colleague Hanja Maij-Weggen.

But the detail and range of policy and institutional issues included was criticised by French Christian Democrat MEP Jean-Louis Bourlanges.

Instead of casting its net wide, he argued, the Parliament should concentrate on insisting that its express approval would be needed before the amended treaty could come into force. He added that MEPs should build alliances with national parliaments in the campaign for a new right of assent.

“If we do not get that right of assent, then national parliaments close to us should not ratify the treaty,” he suggested.

The programme prompted the unusual sight of both British Socialist and Conservative MEPs telling their colleagues they could not support the report.

Tory MEP Brendan Donnelly supported the Parliament's call for more democracy, transparency and subsidiarity and its backing for enlargement. But he firmly rejected the call for an end to the UK's social 'opt out', moves to merge security and internal policy into a European Community framework and demands for a general extension of majority voting.

Unlike his own government, Donnelly said “some extension of majority voting may well have its merits”, but added: “This should be on a piecemeal basis.”

Wayne David, leader of UK Labour MEPs, explained that the same reservations on security policy and majority voting prevented his group from backing the resolution.