Plenaire vergadering EP dag eerder afgelopen door Franse staking (en)
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - A general strike in France on Thursday (23 September) is to see euro-deputies break up their Strasbourg session a day early in a decision unpopular with some.
MEPs voted by 158 out of 296 present on Monday evening to cut Thursday from the agenda following a request by British and Polish conservatives in the ECR group.
Thursday's agenda had just one main item - a vote on a report about the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which will now take place in October. Other meetings will be held as scheduled on the day of the strike. But with no vote taking place, MEPs will be free to leave on Wednesday evening without losing Thursday's daily allowance.
"There will be disruptions and it may be impossible to ensure transport at the usual levels," European Parliament chief Jerzy Buzek said.
He noted that the train and coaches hired each month to ferry MEPs from Strasbourg to Brussels will be running as normal despite the strike. He added that deputies who stick around until Thursday will be able to use parliament cars beyond the usual 20 km limit to help reach airports in neighbouring Germany or Switzerland.
The decision irked centre-right EPP group leader Joseph Daul, himself a Strasbourg-born politician. "So there's no sitting on Thursday? Ah, so you want to sign and get paid, but without a vote, I see," he scoffed, throwing his headphones on the desk.
Mr Buzek, from the same political group, tried to calm him down by saying the changes are "only about one vote."
Prior to the Buzek-Daul exchange, John Bufton from the eurosceptic UK Independence Party attacked the general practice of MEPs decamping from Belgium to France each month. Parliament is holding two sessions in Strasbourg in September to make up for the missing session in the August holiday period in order to comply with the EU treaty, which stipulates that the EU legislature must meet in France 12 times a year.
"People across Europe and the UK would be appalled at all this mess that we're in. We came to Strasbourg twice this month, when the voting could easily take place in Brussels," Mr Bufton said, prompting applause. "There are extra costs of millions of euro, surely time has come for the Parliament to wake up to the fact that we should not meet in this place at all."
"This is not the subject of any debate today ... What you are saying has to do with the EU treaties," Mr Buzek replied.
The inconvenience of the Strasbourg location was also highlighted by the EU commission's decision to skip its regular meeting this week because it was to take place outside Brussels.
Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso, a handful of commissioners and EU foreign policy supremo Catherine Ashton are going to New York to take stock of the Millennium Development Goals, a set of poverty reduction targets set by world leaders 10 years ago.
"All decisions will be taken by written procedure, simply because there are a number of members [of the EU commission] who are traveling [on Tuesday] so it was more practical to do it that way," a commission spokeswoman said on Monday.
Her US commitments will see Ms Ashton miss an informal meeting of EU defence ministers in the Flemish city of Ghent on Thursday and Friday.
Ms Ashton, who was criticised by Dutch, French and Spanish defence ministers for missing a similar event in Majorca in February, will take part in the Ghent meeting via a video-link instead.
The French general strike comes in response to President Nicolas Sarkozy's plan to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 to help balance the national budget. One million French workers already protested against the move in an earlier action on 7 September.