Brussels, 24/01/2001 (Agence Europe) - During its last meeting, the European Parliament Bureau examined the working document by Vice-President Guido Podesta (Forza Irtalia) on the internal reorganisation of the EP in the context of enlargement. This documents aims to prepare the Parliament to welcome, in good conditions, the future MEPs from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, basing itself on two working hypothesis: (1) accession, before the European elections in 2004, of a first group of six countries, which would lead to the use of five additional languages; (2) the accession, after 2004, of eight new Member States, the number of official languages would thus rise from the present eleven to seventeen.
The document reaffirms that "the criteria of multilinguacy, and especially the principal of equality between languages forms a core element of the European Parliament", and that it will thus be necessary "to continue to guarantee that the MEPs may speak and hear their own language in all the meetings and that all the documents are translated into these official languages". The figures that are found in this document, passed on by the President Nicole Fontaine, last 5 December, are based upon an extrapolation of the number of MEPs starting with the present allocation and do not take into account the allocation approved by the Nice European Council. Nevertheless we can retain the scope, namely: in the long term, a thousand additional civil servants (of which a significant part for interpreting and translation tasks). This new staff will be located for half in Brussels and the other half in Luxembourg. This increase in personnel would also imply an additional need for offices in the three places of work. To tackle this, Mr Podesta suggests for: - Luxembourg, the acquisition and extension of the KAD building and the building of additional parking spaces (estimated cost: EUR 159 million); - Brussels, acquisition on the Ardenne building and, with as 50% participation by another institution, the D4 and D5 buildings (estimated cost: EUR 112 million); - Strasbourg, reoccupation of building IPE III, which the EP left in 1995, with an annual rent of around EUR 5 million. On the basis of a financing at the average rate of 5% over 20 years for the acquisition, the increase in annual real estate spending by the Parliament is estimated at EUR 15 million. This amount obviously does not take into account the additional running costs (electricity, water, cleaning, maintenance, security , etc.), which are annually added to this spending.