Brussels, 26/02/2014 (Agence Europe) - A report (Le Siège dans tous ses Etats, 2 ans après) published by the European Association of Young Entrepreneurs tries to bring an end to the controversy of the seat of the European Parliament being in Strasbourg.
“Strasbourg has an undeniable legitimacy to host the seat of the European Parliament”, says the report, which was presented in Strasbourg on Tuesday 25 February. It states that the Treaties make this legitimacy official and that they fix the different working places of the European Parliament in accordance with the principle of geographical diversity.
Given the “wrong and overvalued” estimates spread about by those who oppose the seat being in Strasbourg, “our report deciphers the budgetary documents of the Parliament and shows that the annual cost and its carbon footprint are four or five times less: €51.5 million - in other words 10 cents per citizen per year, or 0.04% of the European Union budget, less than a postage stamp, and 3,250 tonnes of CO2”, the report states.
The latest budgetary documents sent by the secretary general of the European Parliament to the Parliament's budgetary control committee confirm this figure of €51.5 million per year, “putting an end to the false claims of those who oppose Strasbourg and who successfully circulate the figure of €200 million in the media”, say the authors of the report.
The same documents also show that concentrating the Parliament's services in Brussels would require a debt estimated at €1.2 billion - at European taxpayers' expense - in order to ultimately obtain the “theoretical” savings. The report contains recommendations on how to improve the accessibility, accommodation and welcome of MEPs and different actors taking part in the plenary sessions in Strasbourg.
Véronique Mathieu Houillon (EPP, France) and Philippe Boulland (EPP, France) believe that it is time to abandon the wrong €200 million figure, which dates back to 2002. “It's a shame that Strasbourg, a symbol of European unity, seems to be becoming one of disunity and is playing into the hands of the eurosceptics”, said Boulland. (LC)