Controversial ‘commissioners’ set to face grilling from MEPs

By Martin Banks

Date: 01/04/04

SEVERAL nominees for the European Commission from the ten accession states will come under pressure to defend their past during hearings by the European Parliament later this month.

Estonia's commissioner-elect Siim Kallas will find himself in the spotlight, as Tallinn's decision to nominate him sent ripples of surprise through Europe's diplomatic circles.

Kallas, along with prospective commissioners from the nine other accession states due to join the EU on 1 May, will be quizzed on his suitability for the job by MEPs in Brussels on 13-15 April.

Not only current MEPs but also the 162 observer deputies from new member states will be allowed to question the seven male and three female commissioners-to-be.

Estonian observer MEP, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, a former foreign affairs minister, plans to question Kallas on his support for the US-led invasion of Iraq.

"Kallas is very pro-America and I want to establish how he feels this squares with the European Union's somewhat different approach to transatlantic relations," said Ilves, a leading Social Democratic Party member.

"It will also be interesting to see where he stands on other key policy areas where his views do not exactly converge with the EU, such as finance, his area of expertise. I will want to know, for instance, how he thinks the future EU budget should be planned."

However, Ilves, who tops his party's list for June's European elections, does not believe Kallas' communist past should be raised in the hearings - nor should what has become known as the '$10 million affair', a reference to the amount of money lost by the Bank of Estonia when Kallas was its president in 1991-94.

"Kallas has been cleared by a court over this affair and, although we are political opponents, I don't think this is the time or place to bring it up," said Ilves.

Meanwhile, Czech commissioner-nominee, 38-year-old Pavel Telicka, is another controversial choice, given that he does not have full backing from his country's coalition government.

After the sudden resignation on 20 February of commissioner-nominee, Milos Kuzvart, the Czech government quickly named Telicka, the country's EU ambassador, as its new choice.

One coalition partner, the Christian Democrats, said it opposed Telicka's candidacy because he had been a member of the Communist Party before the fall of communism in the former Czechoslovakia in 1989.

Czech Republic Socialist observer MEP Richard Falbr will, however, focus on other issues, if he is given the chance to quiz Telicka in the hearings.

Falbr said: "The general feeling among both the public and Czech Republic politicians is that a commissioner should be some sort of ambassador, representing purely national interests.

"Of course, the reality is quite different but I want to know just how Telicka proposes to deal with this conundrum and avoid the political pressure he is bound to come under to fulfil this role."

The hearings will be overseen by a panel consisting of chairmen and women of the Parliament's 17 committees.

The assembly's biggest political group, the European People's Party, had at its 5 February Congress called on persons who held important posts under the communist regimes in central and eastern Europe to refrain from taking any high level EU jobs.

MEPs will be asked to raise objections to the suitability of any commissioner nominees before Parliament votes on whether to approve the new 30-member Commission in Strasbourg on 5 May.