Brussels, 09/01/2014 (Agence Europe) - Taking note of the preliminary draft agenda for the upcoming European Parliament plenary session in Strasbourg next week, Jean-Pierre Audy (EPP, France) said he was astonished that Article 15 of the Treaty of the European Union (TEU) had been flouted. It requires the president of the European Council to report to the European Parliament after every European Summit, but he failed to brief the EP on the 19 and 20 December 2013 summit on banking union and defence.
The problem was raised by the EPP at the conference of presidents of the EP groups on Thursday 9 January and was noted in the minutes, but the agenda for next week's plenary has not been amended. There will therefore not be any debate on the outcome of the recent European summit and therefore no conference of presidents meetings open to all MEPs on the outcome of the summit. Audy said the fact that nothing at all was planned for the December summit was disgraceful.
He said that since the stable presidency of the European Council had been introduced by the Lisbon Treaty in December 2009, the president of the European Council is expected to report back to the European Parliament on all meetings of the European Council (Article 15 of the TEU). He added that the article had often been ignored and he had raised the question a number of times, but had been greeted by general indifference.
Until now, the EP organised a meeting of the conference of presidents to which all MEPs were invited and at which the president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, briefed the EP on the summits. Audy said he has always felt that these meetings did not comply with the treaty and not only that, they do not allow each MEP to speak, because only the presidents of the political groups speak at the meetings, and this is a lack of democracy. Moreover, the media coverage is extremely limited, compared with a plenary, and no reports are made.
Jean-Pierre Audy said that since the introduction of the stable presidency, MEPs had had far fewer in-depth political debates with heads of state than in the past, when the chair of the Council of Ministers also chaired the European Council. (LC/transl.fl)