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External sources (not reviewed)

All that is foreseen for 2007, and in the next financial perspective there will be only six finance regulations, four of which are very important ones: enlargement, development, good neighbourhood policy and stability.

I believe that the founding fathers too imagined a Europe of cathedrals, expressing an ideal, with an image of a civilisation which is not that of the minarets of Anatolia. I am thinking of Strasbourg cathedral, which was built by great master builders who, like the master builders of Europe, certainly did not think of Europe as including Turkey, of a Europe which would change its borders and become the direct neighbour of Iran, Iraq and Syria.

How far have we got in our efforts to get the information offices of the Commission and of Parliament under the same roof in the capitals?

This issue comes under the general transparency rules of the European institutions which were, in fact, defined in the conclusions of the last European Council, in Helsinki, and I quote, as “an important element in bringing the Union closer to its citizens and improving efficiency”.

To conclude, I would like to say that the solution is not to place these organisations in the same category, but to have the necessary legal tools within the parameters of the European Convention so that those which are not genuine will be identified.

Will the Laeken Declaration recognise that a further democratisation of the European decision-making process calls for a more radical reform, with legislative power vested in two chambers, the European Parliament and a reformed Council that would subsume some aspects of the present Committee of the Regions and would strongly enhance the role of the constitutional regions?

The present issue consists in developing a Mediterranean policy in a Union which is skewed towards the north-east and is focusing less and less on the Mediterranean Basin in the South. The Mediterranean policy is set in a context of wide-ranging interests and latent tensions, and it therefore has to include various different elements such as the development of peace-keeping initiatives – now that the Middle East peace process has been relaunched – and we are grateful for the way that the Pope’s visit to the Holy Land is improving relations between the different religions, leading them towards mutual understanding and support, and the creation of partnership projects involving Northern and Southern Europe, for the very reason that the objective of transforming the Mediterranean into an area of dialogue, tolerance and cooperation that guarantees peace and stability cannot be achieved without firm political will and sustainable, balanced social development.

So that our fellow MEPs might have done their work both as members of the Convention and as legislators, it would have been enough for the work of the Convention – which our Parliament happily has the privilege of hosting – to take place for once in our Strasbourg buildings.

Mr President, with reference to Rule 2 of the Rules of Procedure of this House I want to draw attention to a statement made quite recently in the Scottish Parliament in which a Conservative Member of that Parliament said, in relation to the chairman of the European Parliament's Committee on Fisheries, that ‘it is incumbent upon him to represent the views of the UK Government in relation to the Constitution, and the fact that it might enshrine the common fisheries policy’. This was in relation to the draft Constitution and Mr Stevenson's rapporteurship of a report on the subject.