Brussels, 01/08/2003 (Agence Europe) - At its meeting in Brussels on 28 May, the Executive Board of the European Confederation of Independent Trade Unions (CESI) passed a resolution on public services in Europe, drafted by Klaus Geiser. The resolution is the CESI's contribution to the consultation process on the Commission's Green Paper on utilities. The consultation closes on 15 September 2003.
In the resolution, the CESI criticises (1) the fact that the Commission encourages the opening of markets in a way which does not always acknowledge the importance of goods and services which, in the absence of regulation, are not supplied by the market automatically, nor in sufficient quantities at affordable prices; (2) the lack of legal safeguards in the area of basic services: “Member states should retain the right to take decisions regarding basic public services and local councils particularly should be able to plan their activities in order to provide high quality services at affordable prices; (3) “the obvious intent of the Commission to attempt to secure competence in the area of defining content and development of basic services and to “evaluate and coordinate” the activities of regulatory bodies and national service providers, because this is an attempt to assume a check which does not rightfully pertain to the Commission; and (4) “the fact that the difficulties which can arise in the area of social and territorial cohesion when markets are opened up are often ignored."
The CESI requests include that a) the Commission respect the sovereignty of member states in introducing basic services in the spirit of attaining social and territorial cohesion, in areas where the market alone does not guarantee the necessary level of supply (“member states must be able to decide for themselves on the universal services to provide to their citizens”); b) the different bodies responsible for basic services continue to decide themselves on public demand and establish the norms and content of the services provided themselves; c) not-for-profit activities, for example , social, cultural and charitable, continue to be generally excluded from state aid checks and in theory from the application of European competition law; d) that through being forced to open up to competition, the power to decide if basic services should be provided by public or private companies must not be surreptitiously taken out of national authorities' sphere of decision. This would be prejudicial to the principle of subsidiarity and, for example, as would happen in Germany, to the constitutional right to local political autonomy; and e) the strengthening of subsidiarity and the inclusion of the right to local political autonomy in the treaty which is to be drawn up by the intergovernmental conference under the Italian presidency, on the basis of the Convention results.