Sure.
Mr. Chairman, what I indicated is not that we shouldn't focus on Parliament only...we still focused on Parliament, and we carried out active engagement there with a whole host of meetings. But Parliament made up their mind and voted, basically signed the declaration of 2006 and said to the bureaucrats, “We've made up our minds; give us the legislation.” They only wanted the legislation to approve it. They had already gone so far down the road that, as one guy said in meetings, “You needed to be here before 2006.”
We saw that. When I got involved in this file in March 2007, about six months after the declaration, we had to look at whom to focus on and where to go. We saw there was going to be a tough slog with parliamentarians. They're up for re-election; they're driven by these groups. We had to look at how we could stop this process.
There were two avenues. One was via the commission that put forth the proposal on July 23, 2008. They had the power to pull it off the table if it was not satisfactory to them. Parliament went way beyond what they had put forward. They said there should be a derogation, based on their WTO, their opinions, and because Food Safety Authority experts said seals can be killed humanely. They didn't really like their moving that far on the proposal, but they didn't pull it off the table.
Why wouldn't the commission pull it off the table? They had the power to do it; it was unlikely, maybe because Parliament stamps the president of the commission—they have to approve the commissioners, and so on. There are ways to get back. If they disregarded the advice of Parliament, there are avenues by which they can get back at the commission.
And the third group is the council, the group I referenced with those numbers. All of those countries have 345 votes. You need 255, what's called a “qualified majority”, for them to approve it. Three things constitute that qualified majority: they must have 14 out of 27 countries supporting it; the countries supporting it must represent 62% of the population of the European Union; and they must have 255 votes.