mr president i intend to use somewhat less than my four minutes now in introducing it and maybe a little longer when i reply at the end if there are questions that need clarification
this report is the fruit of a lot of work
the sources of the reforms that we would hope to introduce to our rules of procedure come in part from the work of the reform working group established by the conference of presidents ably chaired by my colleague dagmar roth-behrendt who made a number of proposals that were approved by the conference of presidents and have been forwarded to us to translate as best we can into the rules of procedure
the second source is a lot of smaller changes that in many ways have been in the pipeline for a long time but rather than have a string of reports changing the rules on minor points we have grouped them together
some of these are technical some are clarifying and make our rules more readable such as the one that puts together rules one hundred and forty-one one hundred and forty-two and one hundred and forty-three into a single codified text governing how we actually organise our debates in plenary
related to that is the innovative amendment to say that we should have this blue card procedure to be able to interrupt each other
mr duff for instance right now may want to put a question to me about what i said and i would let him do so for thirty seconds under this rule if it is adopted
i am sure mr president you would already let him do so now if he wanted but fortunately he does not want to
so there are some innovative features that should make our debates a little more lively
i remember when i first proposed the catch-the-eye period at the end of ordinary debates everyone said oh no we cannot do that it will mess up the speaking time of the groups and so on
yet we now do it and it is an accepted part of our procedures and very much welcomed i think by most members
i would suggest that maybe the blue card procedure will be the same there are some hesitations now but let us try it out let us see how it works and i am confident we can make it work
there have also been some amendments which arose as we discussed this either at committee stage or now in plenary
for instance there was a suggestion that all final votes on legislation should automatically be by roll-call vote i think that came from ms dahl
i welcome that amendment and we have put it in my report
there have been suggestions from many members that we put something in the rule about intergroups if only actually to delimit very clearly what they are and what they are not to show that they are informal and that they may not take over the responsibilities of parliamentary bodies
so there are a lot of interesting things in here
there is also the amendment to deal with the odd system we have that our opening session is chaired by the oldest member instead of for instance the outgoing president which happens in some parliaments or an outgoing vice-president even if the president were not re-elected perhaps
that is a rather sensible improvement to our procedures
i will wind up there
i have not used all my time but if i need to i am happy to come back at the end and answer questions or queries
