Strasbourg, 11/07/2000 (Agence Europe) - Adopting the report by the German Christian Democrat Ruth Heironymi the European Parliament increased the budgetary grant to the Media Plus programme aiming to support audiovisual through training aid, on the one hand, and a section dedicated to development, distribution and the promotion of European works,. The Parliament feels that this programme should benefit from a total of EUR 550 million over five years, instead of the 400 million proposed by the European Commission (see EUROPE of 28 June, p.15).
The Parliament also insisted on being fully implicated in the legislative process. At the present time, the Parliament/Council codecision applies to the "training" section, but the most important part of the programme (EUR 350 million on the 400 basic proposals) escapes the EP to the extent that the section dedicated to production and distribution presents itself in the form of a Council decision, over which the MEPs are not consulted. Thus the Parliament decided to challenge the legal basis so as to obtain codecision on the programme as a whole.
Other amendments aim at specifying the content of the programme. The Parliament in particular insists for a wider consideration of multimedia and radio broadcasting. It would like more active support for the creation and calls for linguistic and cultural diversity to be better taking into account.