Mr President, while I congratulate Mr Willockx on taking up a very complex issue and dealing with it in the way he has and in the time he has, I must say on behalf of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Security and Defence Policy that the approach adopted by the Committee on Budgets does not have the full support of the Foreign Affairs Committee. We both agree that ways must be sought to preserve the budgetary rights of the European Parliament and to make the implementation of the CFSP more democratic and efficient. But we diverge on the way this should be done.

The Committee on Budgets has created a new subtitle, B8 - CFSP - while leaving the old B7 as it stands. The Foreign Affairs Committee was actually more ambitious in that it tried to make a distinction between, firstly, CFSP expenditure, which is put under a separate chapter in order not to contaminate the Community pillar, secondly, expenditure relating to the more political aspects of the Community's external policies, such as the European initiative for democracy and the protection of human rights, and thirdly, expenditure associated with external actions of the Community, such as the traditional development or trade policies. So there are three separate approaches. The Foreign Affairs Committee's main aim was to reorganize the budget around the notion of external action as laid down in Article C of the Treaty. The advantage of this was to achieve a higher degree of synergy, which could have derived from the use of different instruments, whether CFSP joint actions, development policy, human rights, democra

cy and so on. This idea has now been weakened by the arbitrary division between CFSP expenditure and Community expenditure.

By going into great detail on CFSP expenditure - the Committee on Budgets did this with the new B8 title, even if it is non-compulsory - there is a risk of undermining the European Parliament's position at the 1996 conference, because we have created rigidity instead of flexibility, albeit with the good intention of controlling more closely a policy which is per se of an intergovernmental nature. The Foreign Affairs Committee wants to ensure that the European Parliament has oversight, not control, over the EU's external actions, including its common foreign and security policy.