Brussels, 27/06/2001 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday, the European Commission presented a new framework for the EU's information and communication activities, centred on interinstitutional cooperation, notably with the European Parliament and Council and also proposing new forms of cooperation with the States, national parliaments, local authorities and civil society.
The Communication adopted by the Commission does not yet propose a global strategy for information policy, but its constitutes a first step, whose aim its to cause a debate centred on content to complete the proposed framework, in order to allow the institutions to reach to citizen. The approach retained is decentralised and based on the autonomy of the institutions, which remain fully responsible for their contacts with the press and the media. The new framework proposes cooperation: - at the political level, in the form of the Interinstitutional group on information - presently formed of Commission and EP members - which will define and supervise the general guidelines and priorities; - at the operational level, that is to say between the services responsible for information activities in the two institutions; - at the decentralised level, in the Member States (external representations and offices). The immediate reactions, in the European Parliament, where contrasted. Thus, Alejo Vidal Quandras and David Martin, Vice-Presidents of the Parliament responsible for information policy welcomed the adoption of the Communication, underlining that the EP and the Commission will have to, in the coming months, make a significant effort to establish a true common strategy in the priority political fields such as enlargement and the major debate on the future of the Union. Far more critical, the MEP Joachim Wuermeling asserts that the already twisted title of the Communications shows that the citizens and institutions of the EU do not speak the same language. The text is even more technocratic, he states, while adding that it is hardly through brochures and the use of the Internet that one may "build bridges towards the citizens". Also, when reiterating the thesis dear to his party, the Bavarian CSU, he reaches the conclusions that "without a new definition of competences, without a limitation to the most essential, the citizen will see in the actions of Europe, an interference in their affairs.