Government, opposition continue to disagree on EU committee

The government and the opposition remained divided yesterday on whether the House Foreign Affairs Committee should become the Committee for Foreign and European Affairs or whether there should be separate committees.

The Leader of the House, Dr Lawrence Gonzi, said that there were too few MPs for the House to have separate committees, much as he would have liked this. Mr Evarist Bartolo, Opposition spokesman on the EU, said the committee would have a central role and a huge workload and it should therefore focus exclusively on EU affairs. Foreign affairs, which were also important, should be handled by another committee. One should also consider whether Malta's parliament would be able to cope with a situation where MPs only worked part time.

The remarks were made at the opening of a debate on a motion by Dr Gonzi for the foreign affairs committee to become the Committee on Foreign and European Affairs.

In terms of the government's proposal, the Committee for Foreign and European Affairs will consist of nine MPs, of whom five will represent the government and will include the chairman and the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Members of the European Parliament elected from Malta will have the right to participate in the work of the committee but will not be able to vote or move motions and amendments.

The committee will have the power to appoint sub-committees and delegate functions to them. The main purpose of the committee will be to deal with matters relating to foreign and European affairs.

In the context of the EU, it will scrutinise any proposals for legislation by the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament any document published for submission to the European Council, the Council of Ministers or the European Central Bank and any other proposals and documents relating to the European Union.

Dr Gonzi said that the government and the opposition agreed that parliament should be adapted to the challenges which EU membership involved. Both sides wanted an efficient and effective structure within parliament to examine all proposals and initiatives in the EU and contribute to them.

EU member states which had large parliaments had opted to create committees specifically to focus on the EU while nations having parliaments with a small number of MPs, like Luxembourg, had chosen to have one committee for EU and foreign affairs.

Malta, which did not have the luxury of having many MPs, had adopted the Luxembourg model but elements of the Irish model had been adopted for wider terms of reference. In this way, the committee the government was proposing would be very flexible and could appoint sub-committees to tackle specific subject areas.

Ideally, Dr Gonzi said, he would have agreed with the opposition's view of having two committees. But the Maltese parliament only had 65 MPs. The government had 35 MPs, of whom 20 were ministers or parliamentary secretaries, three were presidents of House committees and another was the whip, leaving only 11 government MPs available for the committees on social affairs, public accounts, foreign affairs, other House business as well as the parliamentary delegations to the Council of Europe and the IPU, among others.

The manpower problem was already being faced in other committees. Last Wednesday a meeting of the Social Affairs Committee had to be cut short for MPs to attend a meeting of the Public Accounts Committee.

The government's objection to the opposition's stand was therefore only based on practical reasons. Nonetheless, the government's proposal was flexible in that it allowed the foreign and EU affairs committee to set up sub-committees for specific debates. The terms of reference were wide enough to enable the committee to consider any subject linked to the EU. Like the other House committees, the new committee would be able to hear the views of experts on order to help it reach its conclusions.

Mr Bartolo said the opposition agreed on the committee's functions as proposed by the government, but that only underlined the need for EU affairs to be separated from the other business of the Foreign Affairs Committee. No one could deny the problem about the shortage of MPs but the solution proposed by the government would still not solve it anyway.

The committee on EU affairs would be a very important committee, practically a miniature parliament, and it would be hard-pressed to tackle all EU issues, let alone other matters of foreign affairs. National parliaments were every year asked to consider between 1,500 and 2,000 proposals and policy declarations sent to them by the EU. Even if only half deserved in-depth debate, the committee would still have a problem to handle them.

Indeed, the workload would get heavier because the draft EU constitution was proposing to give national parliaments a bigger role in EU law-making so as to bring EU institutions closer to the people. As a result, several EU nations, including Luxembourg and Ireland, were planning to change their current parliamentary structures.

In order to gain the maximum advantage of EU membership, Malta needed to intervene in the consideration of proposed EU laws as early as possible, both in Brussels as well as in Malta through parliament, and keep at it throughout the process. That way it could decide its positions early and forge alliances with likeminded countries.

It was not good enough for Dr Gonzi to have only considered backbenchers in his calculations, since it was important for ministers to attend the meetings of the new committee.

But Malta's problem was not only about the shortage in numbers. Could Malta's parliament remain a part-time institution? This situation was already causing problems. Recently, a bill on patents was almost approved by the House in a way which would have endangered 1,000 jobs, and MPs would not have noticed had pharmaceutical companies not spoken up.

Mr Bartolo felt the country could no longer afford to have MPs who could not focus all their energy on the decisions which had to be taken. Good legislation needed time and study, more so given the jargon of EU documents.

Clearly the House needed to reconsider the situation. The new committee would not only have a massive workload, but it would not be able to set its own timetable. The longer it took to take its decisions, the shorter the time Malta would have to influence EU legislation.

Hence the opposition's proposal for an ad hoc committee to focus exclusively on the EU, backed by a team of technical experts who would be able to understand EU proposals and their impact on Malta and prepare background papers. He seriously doubted that the current parliamentary set-up and the limited time which MPs could allocate to the House would enable them to carry out their work with the seriousness it deserved.

He said his suggestion was that the new committee should start its work well before the accession date so that it would have a proper running in.

Mr Bartolo said the opposition's motion was only meant for the country's good in a situation of 25 countries, wherein Malta needed to be strong in all stages of the various proceedings for the best possible results. The best way to do this was to have a European affairs committee as proposed by the opposition.

Other speakers will be reported tomorrow.