NGO’s unhappy over De Palacio’s transport statements

Date: 24/04/03

By Karen Carstens

A group of 12 NGOs has criticized Loyola de Palacio over comments she made in the German media, which it claims contradict EU transport policies.

The Spanish transport commissioner's statements could "harm the credibility of the entire EU," the NGOs warn in a letter addressed to European Commission President Romano Prodi, European Parliament President Pat Cox and Greek Prime Minister Costas Simitis.

But de Palacio's spokesman Gilles Gantelet said the groups had blown the commissioner's statements out of proportion by extrapolating them to a wider debate on infrastructure charging in the EU instead of certain legal concerns she raised vis-à-vis the German case alone.

The trouble began in February when two German newspapers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) and the Deutsche Verkehrszeitung, attributed remarks to de Palacio in which she voiced concerns over the legality of German government plans to charge lorries for using the country's motorways.

She questioned the proposed method for calculating the tolls as well as plans to share the revenue between road infrastructure and rail and waterways, telling the FAZ that all the money must be spent on roads.

The NGOs, in an effort spearheaded by the European Federation for Transport, sent a letter to de Palacio asking if she had been misquoted.

The NGOs received a reply from her deputy head of cabinet, Margaritis Schinas, which they deemed unsatisfactory. They said Schinas "failed to engage with our concerns, instead making 'clarifications and comments' on points we had not raised in our original letter".

That prompted a wider group of 12 transport and environment NGOs to write to Prodi, Cox and Simitis demanding further action.

De Palacio's comments "seemed to contradict the White Paper on the Common Transport Policy, the 2001 Göteborg summit conclusions and the expression of heads of governments' political will at Barcelona in 2002," they say.

For instance, the Göteborg Council reinforced the need for "full internalisation of social and environmental costs".

However, de Palacio told the FAZ: "The Commission will decline to let the costs of environmental pollution be included in the road charging scheme in order not to punish Göteborg road transport, Europe's most efficient mode."

The Göteborg conclusions also called for action to "bring about a significant decoupling of transport growth and GDP growth, in particular by a shift from road to rail, water and public passenger transport".

De Palacio told the Deutsche Verkehrszeitung: "A pricing system shouldn't be used for interventionist purposes: it would be a big mistake to encourage a shift from road to rail by making road transport more expensive."

The NGOs respond: "If the European Union's high officials can contradict agreed EU policies with impunity in this way, then they will soon not be worth the paper they are written on."

Gantelet said the groups' concerns were "one of two reactions" de Palacio routinely received regarding infrastructure charging. Transport groups, he said, had accused her of being "the devil" for even suggesting that tolls collected from motorways could be used to develop rail and water transport networks.

"Their attempts to try and say what she says and what is in the White Paper are contradictory are foolish," he added. "You cannot oppose a quote which is in a newspaper as contradicting an official document because it is in an article - the document lays out an explicit EU policy."

The Commission is trying to solve a "20-year-debate" in tackling the infrastructure charging issue, he added, so it is hard to keep all sides happy while maintaining economic reason.

A group of 12 NGOs has criticised Transport Commissioner Loyola de Palacio over comments she made in the German media, which it claims contradict EU transport policies.