However, rather than constantly churning out finicky and sometimes overly radical regulations promoting women, we must have faith in their ability to assert themselves and to project their beliefs at every level – local, national or European – as women, certainly, but also as elected representatives.

If we do not close this loophole in our own laws and in the Basle Convention, we will thereby be encouraging people who are less than particular about compliance with the law to make the contamination of the environment an exportable commodity, and to do so is hypocrisy, for while we in Europe talk about our high standards, we also open up any number of loopholes that make it possible for this stuff to be exported, and it is Commissioner Dimas – the poor chap – and, with him, the Commission, who has to carry the can for it, even though I have to tell the President-in-Office that the Commission, in this instance, is quite utterly blameles ...[+++]s.

My motivation was not based on prissy, political correctness but rather to see that women, who had earned the right to be recognized, were not implicitly excluded.

However, at the same time, it will pave the way for a Europe that is less obsessively detailed and less bureaucratic.

Some of them saw this as an opportunity to ask hair-splitting partisan questions about the cost of institutional bilingualism.

Advocates of subsidiarity often present the Commission as a body distant from the real world, seeking to impose over- detailed and unnecessary rules and regulations.