Mr. Rupert Schlegelmilch:

Let me start by pointing out that all the committees are very transparent. We publish the agenda of all the subcommittees and the joint committee in advance. We publish the outcome. We make sure that the European Parliament has a monitoring group and that the European Council, where the member states are represented, is consulted before these meetings. The stakeholders know what is going on and they also have a choice to make themselves heard before the joint committee. There is a stakeholder meeting back-to-back with the joint committee, in order to ensure that the information is available. We are trying to live up to our self-imposed ambition to have a modern agreement which is not being negotiated or implemented - in this case implemented - behind closed doors.

We have good input from all of these actors in order to shape the agenda. This is why we are talking about some of the issues that I mentioned: small and medium-sized enterprises, SMEs, clean technologies, animal welfare, and all these issues that are often brought to us from the bottom-up, by the involvement of the stakeholders.

It is obviously a commercial policy issue and that is why the main role on the parliamentary side is for the European Parliament and Council to oversee the agreement. As I said, we are in constant dialogue because we know that trade policy is complex, and we have to be available. There are working methods between the European Parliament and the national parliaments where issues can be discussed. That is something we are now talking about in the way we are provisionally applying the agreement. We are trying to do what we can to make information available. I would be interested in hearing what ideas there are for us to do better. This is a living agreement. We are not saying that this is the final word on everything. We have gone quite far, if one compares this to what other actors, countries and trade agreements provide by way of transparency. We can claim with some justification that we have a model agreement here.