Brussels, 05/01/2011 (Agence Europe) - In a signed editorial in the Committee of the Regions (CoR) newsletter of December 2010 for the institution's members and institutional partners, Committee President Mercedes Bresso sets out the issues she wants to address in 2011, with one over-riding aim: “implementing all the promises of the Lisbon Treaty”. She warns that she “will be paying particular attention to how the European Commission involves (the CoR) in its work during 2011”, while promising that the Committee will “continue to be its staunch ally, even more so in the current context”.
So that the Committee can fully exercise its new areas of responsibility and explore all the opportunities they provide, Bresso highlights three particularly apposite areas:
- Territorial cohesion: local and regional elected representatives “must leverage the introduction of a new territorial cohesion objective to protect cohesion policy from attempts to renationalise or weaken it”. Thus, Bresso goes on: “We will continue trying to ensure that a regional policy for all Europe's regions is maintained and will call for territorial impact analyses before and after the adoption of new Community legislation”.
- Making the Citizens' Initiative a reality: noting the “role in initiating, mediating and coordinating” that the regions can play, Bresso says that “the Committee of the Regions will therefore work together with the European Parliament to simplify access to this new instrument so that as many people as possible can take advantage of it”.
- Monitoring the subsidiarity principle: the Committee's aim is “to minimise use of the 'coercive' aspect of subsidiarity, and ensure that the requirement of partnership with local authorities is already met before the adoption of a legislative proposal. This approach should guarantee more effective implementation, in the context of new legislation required to address the economic, financial, social and climate crises”.
In addition, for 2011, Bresso says that: (1) the Committee will keep a careful eye to ensure that “that the Structural Funds are not held hostage to an exclusively intergovernmental approach”; (2) “cooperation is necessary in a large number of spheres at all levels of government to make EU rules as clear as possible, so that they can be applied more effectively”; Bresso says that she will put these matters on the agenda for discussion between the Committee and the Commission as part of the review of the two cooperation agreement between institutions due in 2011; (3) on behalf of the CoR, she will “continue the political dialogue initiated with our EU partners”. She ends her editorial by asking whether local and regional authorities in Europe will, in the more or less long term, manage to meet the challenges of an ageing population, climate change and the impact of globalisation, “from a European perspective and with EU support, implementing all the promises of the Lisbon Treaty”.
Committee resolution. Following on from Mercedes Bresso's editorial, the Committee of the Regions adopted a resolution on its work programme for 2011 in plenary session in Brussels on Thursday 2 December. The resolution sets out the priorities based on the Commission legislative and work programme presented by Commission President José Manuel Barroso the previous evening.
In its resolution, the CoR highlights the leverage effect of the European budget on the European economic recovery strategy and the financing of structural investment for local and regional authorities. On the issue of own resources, it presses the Commission to continue its work on using revenue from a tax on financial transactions or financial activities, the sale of greenhouse gas emissions allowances, a tax on air transport, separate European VAT, or a share of the revenue from an energy tax or a company tax.
When asked during the plenary session about recent controversy over EU regional aid, Barroso said: “Let us be clear, cohesion policy doesn't only benefit the regions, it benefits Europe as a whole. It is indispensable for the future of the European Union. The European Commission is proud of the cohesion policy. Without cohesion policy, there can be no Union. There can be no Union without solidarity”. This view was shared by Bresso: “Cohesion policy is one of Europe's greatest achievements. It has helped to modernise transport links, it has helped millions of people to find new jobs, and it has helped our efforts to protect the environment. There is of course always room for further improvement and simplification. But already today cohesion policy is the best-controlled funding programme in the world,” she said. (G.B./transl.rt)