Brussels, 29/10/2002 (Agence Europe) - Partido Popular MEP Jose Maria Gil-Robles, President of the International European Movement, considers the preliminary draft institutional text presented by Valery Giscard d'Estaing to be a "very positive advance that goes along the lines of greater readability and visibility, and that it will thus allow for genuine citizen rapprochement to the Union". However, in a press release, the former president of the EP riles against the idea of creating a European Congress, which, according to him, would be a "novelty that would only complicate an already sufficiently burdensome institutional scheme". To have "a minimum of representation", such an assembly would have to "be closer to the number of the members of the former Communist regimes", and that, "would only serve to sap the role of the European Parliament … and the Council", says Gil-Robles, recalling that the possibility of convening a Congress bringing together the EP and national parliaments is provided for in the treaties and has only been used once (at the December 1990 assizes in Rome), with "not a very encouraging result".