Go back to the Europarl portal

Choisissez la langue de votre document :

 Index 
 Full text 
Verbatim report of proceedings
Tuesday, 14 May 2002 - Strasbourg OJ edition

European Parliament estimates for 2003
MPphoto
 
 

  Virrankoski (ELDR). – (FI) Mr President, Mr Stenmarck has drawn up a very rational and balanced estimate of Parliament’s estimated revenue and expenditure for the next financial year and my sincerest thanks go to him for that. The report also serves as a good basis for later discussion of the budget in the autumn.

The 2003 budget is likely to be the last before EU enlargement. For that reason the rapporteur has set aside considerable sums of money for the new Member State’s admission to the EU. The rapporteur is proposing that EUR 32 million is needed for enlargement immediately and a further EUR 51 million for a special reserve. When we also take into consideration the 6 million euros reserved for observers and the extension of property reserve of 15 million euros it is my group’s opinion that sufficient funds have indeed been set aside for preparations for enlargement.

The language issue is one of the hardest matters to deal with. Nearly every new Member State will also bring its own language to the European Union. For democracy to function properly it is vital that every EU citizen can stand as a candidate for election to the European Parliament without being required to be fluent in a foreign language. This places special demands on the European Parliament with regard to interpreting. All of us must be able to take part in the debate in our own mother tongue. On the other hand, it is virtually impossible to arrange for the smaller languages to be interpreted just through one interpreter. For example, Finnish is interpreted first into English, say, and only then into Greek. In my opinion, we should establish the practice of interpreting as many languages as possible, including the smaller ones, into the most important languages, that is to say, English, French and German. In this way Members could listen to the original speech in these languages as interpreted by just the one interpreter.

Another crucial problem is the support of Parliament’s core activities. It is incomprehensible that the committees should be short of staff to carry out preparatory work at the same time as legislation work has increased. It is important to give more support to this basic work. Parliament must be capable of high standards in its treatment of matters, as, otherwise, the Commission and the Council will become too overbearing and above all because the quality of legislation will otherwise suffer.

 
Legal notice - Privacy policy