What are the powers of the European Parliament?
Description
This article is from the European Union FAQ, by Roland Siebelink & Bart Schelfhout with numerous contributions by others.
What are the powers of the European Parliament?
Richard Corbett[60] provided me with this excellent rewritten and extended
section on the powers of the European Parliament:
+The powers of the European Parliament vary considerably from one p
olicy area to the next. In some policy areas it is significantly lack
ing in power compared with the position of national parliaments in fu
nctioning democracies, whereas in other areas, it virtually forms par
t of the bicameral legislature together with the Council. The procedu
res are as follows (all beginning with a proposal from the Commission
):
Consultation procedure:
Parliament is simply asked to give its opinion, and
Council takes the decision. However, Council must wait
for Parliament's opinion and any parliamentary
amendments that are accepted by the Commission can
only be modified in Council by unanimity;
Co-operation procedure:
two readings in each body (Council and Parliament),
the first as under the consultation procedure, the
second allowing Parliament to adopt further amendments
or to reject Council's text (in which case Council can
only approve it by overruling Parliament unanimously
within three months);
Co-decision procedure:
two readings in each body followed by a conciliation
committee if their positions still diverge. If the
conciliation committee agrees on a compromise, both
Council and Parliament have to approve it. If
conciliation fails, Council may adopt a text
unilaterally, but this text will not become law if
Parliament rejects it within six weeks;
Assent procedure: Parliament's approval required (in a single reading
with no amendments) for a measure to be adopted by
Council;
Budget procedure: two readings in each body with Parliament having the
final say over some items and Council over others.
However, neither can go beyond a certain rate of
increase without the approval of the other, and
Parliament can reject the budget as a whole.
In the second reading of the cooperation or codecision procedures,
Parliament is constrained by the requirement to obtain a majority of
its members to amend the Council position or to reject it. In other w
ords, abstentions or absences do not count: 314 of the 626 members mu
st vote in favour of the amendment or rejection.
Given the inevitable absenteeism of at least some members at any gi
ven moment, this requirement has the effect of obliging Parliament's
political groups to negotiate broadly based compromises: something th
at probably makes political sense anyway when dealing with the Counci
l, which is composed of ministers from a variety of different politic
al backgrounds according to the majorities and coalitions in the Mem
ber States.
Only under the codecision procedure and the assent procedure does P
arliament have an absolute right of veto which cannot be overriden by
the Council (even by unanimity). The codecision procedure applies to
about a quarter of the total volume of European legislation going th
rough Parliament. This includes most single market legislation, the r
esearch programme, environmental programmes, consumer protection legi
slation, programmes in the field of public health and education and t
ranseuropean networks.
In the other procedures, Parliament remains somewhat dependent on t
he position adopted by the Commission. If the Commission accepts Parl
iament's amendments to its proposals and incorporates them in a modif
ied proposal to the Council, the latter needs unanimity to remove the
amendments, whereas a qualified majority will normally be enough to
adopt the proposal as a whole.
Despite Parliament's weakness in the cooperation procedure - where
it can ultimately be overruled by Council - a large proportion of its
amendments under this procedure still gets through. In his excellent
work on the European Parliament, Martin Westlake[61] puts forward a
grand total of all the 322 proposals dealt with under the co-operati
on procedure up to 30 December 1993.
First reading Second reading
European Parliament 4572 amendments tabled 1074 amendments tabled
European Commission 2499 (54,65%) taken up 475 (44,22%) taken up
Council of Ministers 1966 (43%) accepted 253 (23,55%) accepted
[Source: Westlake 1994, p265]
In looking at these figures, and seeing that only half of Parliamen
t amendments end up in the final legislation, two things should be bo
rne in mind. First, the other branch of the legislative authority - t
he Council - is also democratically elected, albeit indirectly, as ea
ch of its members belongs to an elected national government.
Secondly, the executive (in this case the Commission) is rather wea
k compared to most national executives (governments). Its proposals r
arely get through Parliament and Council without substantial amendmen
ts -unlike the situation in many national parliaments. In absolute te
rms, the number of amendments put into legislation by the European Pa
rliament is far greater than many national parliaments."
There is another area in which the EP's powers have risen considerably.
Since the Maastricht Treaty,[62] the European Parliament must approve both
of the President of the Commission and of the Commission in full. It can
also make the Commission resign with a 2/3 majority. It cannot sack
individual Commissioners.
The newly elected EP of 1994 has interpreted this decision as such that it
has the right to question all individual candidate Commissioners thoroughly
(modelled on the US Senate +hearings; for candidate government ministers)
before approving of the new Commission as a whole. The new Commission
president has accepted this interpretation in practice; hearings have taken
place from 16 to 20 January 1995, and the Commission president has had to
make some changes to and supplementary promises about the portfolios of his
fellow Commissioners as a result of the hearings, before his Commission was
approved with a 417 against 104 majority.
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