Brussels, 11/06/2012 (Agence Europe) - MEPs from the European Parliament civil liberties committee (LIBE) were ready to battle against the Council on Monday evening in Strasbourg on the Schengen evaluation system, ignoring the decision of member states on 7 June to exclude the Parliament from any amendments to the future mechanism, and giving their own verdict on the subject. Meeting in the evening, MEPs were expected to adopt two reports successively: one by Carlos Coehlo (EPP, Portugal), which focuses directly on reform of the Schengen evaluation mechanism, and the other by Renate Weber (ALDE, Romania) on the Schengen border code and new possibilities for member states to re-introduce border controls.
On Thursday evening in Luxembourg, ministers responsible for home affairs decided to change the legal basis of the proposal on the evaluation mechanism and effectively exclude the European Parliament from the co-decision process by giving it an exclusively consultative role. This effectively “declared war” against the Parliament, as the Belgian leader of the ALDE Group, Guy Verhofstadt, explained.
Last September, the European Commission tabled its evaluation proposals and sought to bring MEPs into the evaluation process by way of co-decision (Article 77), enabling MEPs also to set rules that member states should follow when they assess the Schengen system and verify how exactly member states put the acquis into place. For MEPs, this proposal also provided easier access to currently confidential evaluation reports, explained one EP source. The legislative proposal also provided the Commission with a role that placed it slightly more on a par with the member states and in which it would be able to carry out planned or unannounced visits. In the compromise reached on 7 June, member states said that they wanted to keep the Commission in its initial role, whereby its experts could carry out visits in the field but together with national experts. The EP regretted that this would mean the Commission keeping a role of “simple observer” with the evaluation mechanism remaining a “purely inter-governmental exercise”.
On Thursday at the end of the meeting, Commissioner Cecilia Malmström said that she was disappointed by this result and criticised the “lack of ambition of member states”. The Commission and the European Parliament consider that this is about respecting the transparency principle and they would like to be informed as best they can about decisions made by member states on Schengen. This is of crucial importance to the two institutions because as a last resort, they are able to suspend a country from the Schengen area (for a maximum of two years).
MEPs have therefore decided to take a tougher tone and adopt their two reports while ignoring the change of legal basis. With regard to the report by Weber on the border code, they also decided to vote to continue discussions that were opened with member states after an initial committee position vote on 25 April. During this vote, MEPs gave a negotiating brief to the Romanian MEP in which they did not include migratory flows as a reason for re-introducing internal border controls and said that apart from emergencies (a state can re-establish controls itself for a maximum of 10 days) it would be up to the Commission to decide whether to re-introduce controls in certain member states. On 7 June, the Council pointed out that this decision could, on the contrary, only be made by the Council.
The strategy chosen at this stage by the LIBE committee MEPs is to go to the legal affairs committee and the European Court of Justice once the two reports are voted on in the plenary sessions (in July), explained the same source. The source also explained that this was because: “For the EP legal service, it is indeed Article 77 of the Treaty (co-decision) which must apply.”
There is a problem, however, because the Council is also drawing on its own legal service, which has pointed out that only Article 70 constituted the law. The Danish Presidency over the past two days has also attempted to convince MEPs of the Council's good faith, emphasising in a letter the purely technical choice of member states and that it was not in any way political. The Danish Presidency effectively denies there being any intention of keeping the European Parliament out of the discussions on Schengen, and points out that the Council had no other choice under the Lisbon Treaty, consultation only being possible when member states opt for mutual assessment (the peer-to-peer review). One Council source also pointed out that MEPs had from the outset been kept up to speed about the choice of legal basis and that they had not in this sense been presented with a fait accompli on 7 June. The source also indicated that the EP should think about the action it takes and its responsibility in this pointless institutional battle.
MEPs and the Council will, nonetheless, be able to discuss the matter in detail on 12 June during the plenary. The Danish minister for justice, Morten Bodskov, has been asked to attend this meeting. A spokesman at the Parliament said that the debate was essential for setting out what approach should be followed. The chances of a successful outcome at the European Court of Justice still remain to be seen, explained one EP source, for whom, “even if there is a lot of noise made, it is still too early to know what is going to happen”. (SP/transl.fl)