Tolken kosten Europees Parlement 118.000 euro per vergaderdag (en)
Auteur: | By Lucia Kubosova
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - It would be undemocratic for MEPs to be required to speak foreign languages, but they should be aware how much interpretation costs - even when they do not show up for meetings, argues Finnish deputy Alexander Stubb.
His forthcoming report - to be voted on next week in Strasbourg - criticises the EU institutions for wasting interpretation money due to bad planning.
With 21 official languages in the EU institutions, interpretation eats up less than one percent of the total bloc's budget and Mr Stubb comments, "if that's what it takes for us to understand each other in a sensible way, let's go ahead and pay for it."
However, he points out that around 16 percent (€25.9 million in 2003) of the interpretation costs involve services that were ordered but not used or cancelled at the last minute.
The European Parliament is a front runner in this practise seeing almost 30 percent higher average costs than in other EU bodies - the parliament pays around €1,500 in average costs per interpreter per day, the European Commission pays around €1,000.
"The reason is that there's more stand-by in the parliament and that we have to travel to Strasbourg," explains the Finnish centre-right rapporteur from the budgetary committee.
He argues more should be done to better plan the meetings, but it is also crucial for deputies to realize the costs involved.
"I wanted to raise awareness by this report so that, say, a Polish MEP understands that if he or she demands Polish for a full-day meeting it costs €1,500 and if he doesn't show up, that's a waste of tax payers' money."
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Mr Stubb encountered opposition when he first introduced his ideas on how to make parliament's spending on interpretation more effective.
In his earlier report - withdrawn and replaced by a less radical version - he suggested that the administration could draw up some kind of language profiles of MEPs which would then be used to make it more flexible for arranging the meetings - without always providing all the languages.
"Some people felt that this would lead to a ranking of languages, pointing out that English is the most spoken first language and so on, while that would lead to a lesser grade for other languages, so I decided to go quite careful on that one."
But he says he is now acutely aware that for "99 percent of people in the parliament, the issue of language is not about communication but about cultural diversity."
Coming himself from a bi-lingual Finnish-Swedish family and always using English or French at the plenary debates, Mr Stubb argues that he understands this argument but he still regards language primarily as a method of communication.
"We can say that we are communicating with the people back home even when speaking in the European Parliament and of course that's part of it, but I also think that in order for us to have an interesting and lively debate, it's better to communicate in a language which can be understood by most people."
In his report, the MEP argues that if parliament meetings could be held in three languages, costs would drop to €8,900 per day, while a full regime with all the languages provided costs €118,000 per day.
Mr Stubb thinks that EU institutions should co-operate better and so avoid the ineffective use of interpreters.
However, his suggestion to study a possibility of merging of the parliament's and commission's interpretation services into a central body - as in the case of the recently established EU recruitment office - was turned down by the parliament's administrators.
"They said that interpretation is different in all institutions and I buy that argument but I still think it would have been quite useful at least to make a study of such a possibility," he said, adding that the idea did not make it into the final text of his report.
"It must have something to do with personal interests. People want to decide on their own matters."
"If you have administration in parliament that provides interpretation, they're quite happy to do their own deals, whereas the commission likes to do theirs as well. Of course, the commission and council's service is larger, so the parliament administrators were perhaps afraid they would lose out," Mr Stubb suggested.