Intervento del Presidente del Parlamento danese, Ivan  Hansen

 Conclusions of the Working Group on the Quality of Legislation

Honoured Presidents of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, dear Colleagues,
I should like to begin my speech by thanking one of our two hosts, the President of the Chamber of Deputies, Mr. Luciano Violante, for the important contribution, which he has made in his capacity as leader and originator of the Working Group on the Quality of Legislation.
The Working Group was set up at our meeting in Helsinki in 1997. At our meeting in Lisbon in May 1999, the Working Group submitted a report and subsequent to the meetings, which took place in Cogne and Fiesole, it has rendered its conclusions in a memorandum.
I should also like to thank the other contributors, be they colleagues or civil servants.
I have not been able to take part in the latest phase myself. But the First Deputy Speaker of the Danish Parliament and our civil servants have currently been briefing me.
On former occasions, a number of papers have been circulated concerning the initiatives which we have taken in Denmark - in a co-operation with the Governement, which was not always plain sailing. Furthermore, our initiatives have been mentioned in the interesting report elaborated by the OECD's Public Management Programme, which is annexed to the memorandum of the Working Group.
I should like to say that I have great respect for the work, which has been carried out. I see it as an important step towards improving the quality of legislation in the individual Member States as well as improving our common EU rules and the way in which these rules are being implemented in the various Member States.
We have forwarded our comments to the last draft and today I shall go no further than making some general comments to the proposals on our future co-operation.
We agree that it will be useful for all Member States to adopt a system, which will make information on various conditions in the other Member States readily accessible.
The individual Parliaments have great knowledge and experience and it is desirable for other Member States to make use of this knowledge when dealing with similar subjects. But we do not think that such knowledge should be imparted via extensive databases.
Direct communication is usually to be preferred whether it be an exchange of information between participants in the present forum, in parallel parliamentary committees, among MPs or among members of our staffs.
I should also like to mention the co-operation which has already been established between the Environment Committees of our Parliaments and the similar type of co-operation which - again on Denmark's initiative - is being established with Sweden, Finland, Germany and France within the field of transport.
Finally, I shall not forbear to mention the informal Nordic co-operation going on, not least among civil servants doing parliamentary, legal research on changes to our procedures.
They know one another and get to know one another even better at joint meetings taking place once every two years. This enables them, within a very short span of time, to brief Presiding Officers and MPs on subjects relation to parliamentary procedures such as for instance the drawing up of a list of speakers, speakers' time-limits etc. in their respective countries, either over the telephone, by facsimile or email. I should like to recommend a similar co-operation at European level.
The other subject, which I shall mention briefly, is the recommendation that the OECD and The European University Institute of Florence should also include analyses of parliamentary subjects concerning legislation in their present activities.
We agree that the said institutions have done a great work and been of invaluable help to the Working Group but we do not find that there is any reason to include any other international institutions in our inter-parliamentary work on a permanent basis.
In the memorandum of the Working Group, reference is made to the existing organisations, the ECPRD and the IPU, which are already engaged in elaborating various parliamentary, legal accounts. And they will probably be able to improve the passing on of the knowledge already available in the two organisations.
However, I should like to repeat that we value the important work carried out in the OECD and at The European University Institute in connection with the project of the Working Group.
Dear Hosts and Colleagues, thank you very much for your attention.