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Verbatim report of proceedings
Tuesday, 5 May 2009 - Strasbourg OJ edition

General revision of the Rules of Procedure (debate)
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  Monica Frassoni, on behalf of the Verts/ALE Group. (IT) Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance have never had much time for the great parliamentary reforms carried out by Mr Corbett – he is a friend of mine and we have worked together for many years, he is aware of this and he will not hold it against me – because they tend to turn our Parliament into a bureaucratic machine where the role of individual MEPs and minority groups and even the committees must be subject to the growing, partly arbitrary, decision­making power of the Conference of Presidents and the administration. In addition, they make the relationship between the primary committee and committees asked for an opinion in the legislative procedure confused and basically conflictual.

I must say I am staggered that this evening, in this debate, we are not talking about the things that we consider to be the fundamental problems in this procedural reform. The first thing is the confusion that will inevitably be created between the primary committee and the committee asked for an opinion, because when the primary committee rejects the amendments of the committee asked for an opinion, these amendments might end up directly in the Chamber, obviously creating an extremely risky potential for legal confusion – as we also incidentally saw in the case of REACH.

No committee asked for an opinion is, furthermore, actually free to carry out its work, due to the confused and absolutely unacceptable mechanism represented by the possibility of making joint votes and having joint rapporteurs on topics particularly important to our legislative power.

Lastly, Mr President, there is another element that concerns us very much. One of the outcomes to emerge from the working group on internal reform, of which I was a part, and that we originally considered positive, was the proposal to strengthen the powers and the role of the Committee on Petitions in a truly significant manner. In this reform, however, the role of the Committee on Petitions has been killed off, in the sense that it will no longer be possible for the Committee on Petitions to find its way directly to the Chamber except after unspeakable complications and possible conflicts with the competent committee.

For all these reasons, our group considers that this reform is not ready and we believe that it would be an error by a majority of our Parliament to adopt it.

 
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