National Parliaments and European Commission: 2008 Report

Version française

Source : July 11, 2009 EUlaw http://eulaw.typepad.com/eulawblog/2009/07/national-parliaments-and-european-commission-2008-report.html

The EC Commission has published its annual report on its relations with national parliaments (COM (2009) 343).

Back in 2006, the Commission published a rather verbose paper (Com (2006) 211) stating on page 9 that it would provide all national parliaments in the member States not just consultation documents prepared by the Commission (green and white papers and communications), as already required by the Protocol to the Treaty of Amsterdam, but also all new Commission proposals. We noted this here.

Since then, the number of opinions received from national parliaments has increased steadily from 53 in 2006, 115 in 2007 to 200 in 2008.

The 2008 report makes quite interesting reading generally. There's a section on the effects of the opinions received on policy. The opinions of national parliaments tended to be in line with the positions taken by the member States in Council.

IMHO (In My Humble Opinion) : IPEX website is improving very slowly

References:

COSAC (Conference of Community and European Affairs Committees of Parliaments of the European Union) http://www.cosac.eu/en/

COSAC links http://www.cosac.eu/en/links/doc/

IPEX http://www.ipex.eu/ipex/

Exchanging EU information among parliaments has become increasingly important during the past decade. In order to facilitate the flow of information, national parliaments - in cooperation with the European Parliament - have created their own database and website – www.ipex.eu.

The IPEX Database contains a complete catalog of Commission documents from 2006. From each Commission document users can click on "Related dossiers" and from there access national scrutiny pages. Each national scrutiny page contains documents from the individual national parliaments relating to the specific Commission document or legislative procedure.

IPEX also hosts a calendar of interparliamentary cooperation which contains information concerning all interparliamentary meetings relating to the European Union.