Staes (Verts/ALE), deputising for the rapporteur. – (NL) Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I am deputising here for Mrs Rühle, the real rapporteur, who unfortunately cannot present her report herself. I would like to concur with the words of Mr Mulder and I too would like to thank Mrs Schreyer for the dedication she has shown over the past five years and for the candour with which she has entered into the debate. Although we belong to the same political family, we have not always agreed with each other. We sometimes held different views, but I have always very much appreciated the way in which we have been able to cooperate with all of Parliament. I would expressly like to thank you for that, Mrs Schreyer.

Just a few days before enlargement, we are debating here the implementation of the budget of the European Coal and Steel Community for the budget year ending on 23 July 2002. Let us say it frankly and freely: the ECSC was the first concrete cooperation in Europe between partners who had fought bloody wars against each other three times in the sixty years before. Wars that caused great personal suffering and millions of unnecessary deaths. The stories of my own grandfather who, as a young newly married man, slaved in the trenches of the IJzer near Ypres in the 1914-1918 war and the stories in our family about what happened to him always made a very strong impression on me. They made me a confirmed pacifist, a confirmed supporter of the Flemish Movement and a confirmed European.

The cooperation between France and Germany started with cooperation in the field of the two large industrial sectors of the time, coal and steel, and was later expanded to economic cooperation and a European agricultural policy. All in all, this cooperation has ensured that we here in the European Union have lived in peace for sixty years. I think that this point should be made once again most emphatically, especially in the run up to the campaign for the European elections of 10 and 13 June.

Mrs Rühle’s report, that is before us today, is not controversial. Nor have any amendments been submitted. The report rightly expresses respect for the virtues of all those who instituted and shaped the ECSC and, therefore, made a very concrete contribution to the unification of Europe. The ECSC is now in liquidation, after operating for fifty years. The Rühle report clearly indicates what measures the Commission and the Court of Auditors will still have to take in the coming months and years. Commissioner, Parliament is counting on this being done with the utmost scrupulousness and that will also be evident from the vote tomorrow afternoon.