‘Angry’ Wallström berates Convention over environment

Date: 05/06/03

By Karen Carstens

MARGOT Wallström is less than happy about the watering down of environmental commitments in the latest draft EU constitution the Convention on the future of Europe released on 27 May.

"I'm not only worried - I'm angry," said the environment commissioner after opening the European Commission's third annual 'Green Week', which concludes today (5 June). "How can you simply forget about 30 years of inserting the environmental movement into the [EC] Treaty?"

While the draft constitution does mention 'sustainable development', the Convention's inner circle, the praesidium, has not put the ecological dimension - "protection and improvement of the quality of the environment" - on an equal footing with the economy and society, the two other pillars of sustainable development.

"So we have to take up the same fight on the same point over and over again," Wallström said. "This is not tolerable for Europe. We need to raise the bar, to go over and above what we've done before," she added. "This was the whole idea of the Convention - to create a treaty that will last for years, that will stand the test of time."

If the current wording goes through, she added, the EU's citizens will be sorely disappointed. "Then you've lost all sight of what the EU is there for and what people expect us to do," the commissioner said.

The 'Green 8', a grouping of the eight largest environmental NGOs in Europe, echo Wallström's worries. They said they support the commissioner's initiative to introduce a protocol on sustainable development into the draft constitution.

But they also welcomed, in a 28 May statement, the fact that the principle of integrating the environment into all Union policies had been reinserted into the draft constitutional treaty, albeit in a less prominent spot than in the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty.

Still, they warned that the Convention "has to do more than pay lip service" to the "fundamental values" of strengthening sustainable development and participatory democracy, because "Europe's citizens expect and deserve better".

Margot Wallström, European Commissioner for the Environment has criticised the European Convention for watering down the EU's environmental commitments.