EU Intitutions’ documents exchanges to (and from) National Parliaments

Version française

A substantial part (if not the majority) of national law and regulation find its source in the European Union (EU). Therefore is required a monitoring of the process both at the European level (within the so called "legislative triangle": Commission, Parliament and Council). But hold is also true at the national level (or even regional for the federal states): by national parliaments, civil society, business, lobbies and other stakeholders.
The EU should facilitate the exchange of information and documents in a targeted way, thematically.
Institutions of the Union.broadcast on their sites certainly all the necessary documents, but no one is able to follow the process in an easy way, from a Commission ‘s proposal without an heavy human and financial investment. Lobbies 15,000 Europeans and their representatives in Brussels have inderstood it.
But the others?

One possible solution would be to set up on the registers of Commission, Parliament and Council a RSS feed service based on a thematic research such as that offered by IBM. (See below)
The search criteria and reporting should be that of the inter-institutional code of a legislative procedure and the year of its initialization, the language code (knowing that it is better to focus on English or french). This assumes, of course, that the institutions' registers index all documents that refer to this legislative process ( but that must be done for internal purposes)
National parliaments (or even regional) should be invited to generate RSS respecting those rules to complete the vision at the national level .. This would allow for each of the procedures to build a feed aggregator such as those appearing on http://www.netvibes.com/juriconnexion
Hopefully, the ongoing revision of the Regulation 1049/2001 will lead to such tools.
So far, that is not possible on the sites of the Union

Exemple : IBM’s RSS feeds based on search criteria

Other sources: Bartolus (EU Law Blog) at

http://eulaw.typepad.com/eulawblog/2008/02/new-rules-of-pr.html

National Parliaments, having long been sidelined either by the executives of the member States or by the European Parliament itself, are making a comeback in European affairs…

Back in July 2006 we noted how the Commission intended to send all proposals to national parliaments. And then there are the even greater changes to be made by the Lisbon-Reform Treaty we noted here.

But there's one organization that already works and that is the Conference of Community and European Affairs Committees of Parliaments of the European Union, known as COSAC. It was established in November 1989. It drew up some non-binding guidelines in 2003 known as the "Copenhagen Parliamentary Guidelines" to set out how coöperation should work.

The new Rules of Procedure of COSAC - drawn up in May 2003 - have just been published !

Never too late to be transparent.

 

References

Observatoire législatif du Parlement européen (ŒIL): critères de recherche (search criteria)

PreLex Monitoring of the decision-making process between institutions 

These two services for legislative monitoring have to offer the same kind of service.

 

IPEX (Interparliamentary EU Information Exchange)

IPEX seeks to expand the information base available to national parliaments with regard to specific
EU documents or topics. This could be especially important as a result of the new provisions in the
Lisbon Treaty concerning the role of the national Parliaments.

IPEX contains parliamentary documents and information concerning the European Union. Parliamentary
documents, which are uploaded individually by each national parliament, are the main building
blocks of the IPEX database. These documents are organised according to the specific EU document
which they relate to.

IPEX also hosts a calendar of interparliamentary cooperation which contains information concerning
all interparliamentary meetings relating to the European Union. In addition, IPEX provides links to
relevant websites and databases as well as links to EU relevant pages on the web-sites of national
parliaments.

http://www.ipex.eu/ipex/cms/home/pid/24583

XML forum

See also

Report of the Working Group on Interparliamentary Cooperation.doc / Mar 19, 2008 

Rapport du Groupe de Travail sur la coopération interparlementaire.doc Mar 19, 2008 

 

UK

Parliament: “You are subscribed to EU Committee Home Page (House of Lords) for The

United Kingdom

Parliament. This information has recently been updated.

The following links will allow you to view a copy of the updated information”.

“Committee's EC Annual Policy Strategy report debated
The Committee's Twenty-Third report, The Commission’s Annual Policy Strategy for 2008, which was published on 4 July 2007, was debated in the Lords Chamber on Thursday 28 February 2008.
Read the debate in Lords Hansard

You can update or cancel your subscription at any time on your User Profile Page. All you will need are your e-mail address and your password (if you have selected one). This service is provided free of charge by: The United Kingdom Parliament”.

 

Surveys

Survey: Parliament 'powerful', but 'what does it do?'

http://www.euractiv.com/en/future-eu/survey-parliament-powerful/article-170796 

EurActiv, Sondage : le Parlement est puissant, mais que fait-il vraiment ?

http://www.euractiv.com/fr/avenir-europe/sondage-parlement-puissant-vraiment/article-170806

 

Eurobarometer: The European Parliament (report 127 pages, march 2008

http://www.ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_288_en.pdf (english version)

http://www.ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_288_fr.pdf (version française)