Brussels, 06/02/2014 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday 5 February, the European Parliament approved, subject to certain amendments, the proposal aiming to bring the monitoring of fishing activities regulation into line with the Treaty of Lisbon.
The European Commission has proposed reclassifying the competences conferred under the former comitology procedure, dividing these up between delegated acts and implementing acts.
The division criteria for these competences are laid down by the treaty but, in practice, “we are faced with a massive grey area which leads to necessary political arbitration, which is, indeed, the responsibility of the legislator”, explained the rapporteur, Isabelle Thomas (S&D, France).
The Commission's proposal decides almost systematically in favour of delegated acts, “and we are told that, as these delegated acts are subject to the Parliament's a posteriori monitoring, the Parliament will retain the responsibility for this”, Thomas said. She called on MEPs to proceed with “caution” as, currently, the Parliament has “neither the human resources nor the necessary procedures” to make a serious job of carrying out this a posteriori monitoring. However, without these two conditions, “the spirit of the treaty would be overturned”, the rapporteur said.
The EP is arguing in favour of “uniform” implementation of the regulation. It supports the Commission's proposal to prioritise delegated acts in order to ensure that the fishermen of the various regions do not suffer any injustice. The EP is firmly in favour of a legal alignment, without calling for a revision of the monitoring regulation. This, the rapporteur argues, is logical, as the reform of the common fisheries policy presupposes a subsequent revision of the monitoring regulation. By means of amendments, the EP is making recommendations to the Commission that it take account of the future monitoring regulation.
Carmen Fraga Estevez (EPP, Spain) drew the Commission's attention to the urgent need to carry out a “full revision of the regulation on monitoring”, in order to take account of the new common fisheries policy (which entered into force on 1 January 2014) and “to ensure that the sector is not subjected to a raft of modifications. Any error in interpretation could bring about serious consequences in the form of sanctions”, Fraga argued. She also stressed the need for great caution over the delegated acts. “We must ask how far the EP can go in its monitoring mission, particularly in the case of committees with few members and few resources available to them”, she concluded.
Maria Damanaki, European Commissioner for Fisheries, said that the proposal aims to ensure that the powers of the Commission with regard to implementing acts and delegated acts “corresponds to the rules laid down in the treaty”. This monitoring regulation did not enter into force until 2010, the commissioner pointed out, calling for a bit more time for a proper assessment to be carried out. The first report on the functioning of the monitoring regulation will be published in the first half of 2015. The Commission will then see whether the provisions of the regulation on monitoring need to be reviewed. “It is my successor to the post of Fisheries Commissioner who will have to to tackle this dossier with the EP early next year”, Damanaki concluded.
Omnibus text. Many MEPs reproached the Commission for having presented another proposal, an “omnibus” text to bring the monitoring into line with the requirements of the ban on discards (and the obligation to land all catches), without making the necessary adjustments to the regulation on monitoring. “We have a revision in the form of slices of salami: a bit of landing here, then data collection”, Thomas lamented. The omnibus text “provides more than 30 modifications compared to the previous version of the monitoring regulation”, Fraga stated.
Thomas thanked the commissioner for her clarifications. “Unfortunately, I note that we are still in vague territory over the question of the revision”. Fishermen need rules “not to change every four days”. If you change the rules every day (data collection a short while ago, discards in 2013, monitoring in 2015), the risk is that there will be “not just saturation, but also exasperation, and that the fishermen will be the victims of the situation”, Thomas concluded. (LC/transl.fl)