The Greens/EFA Group in the European Parliament has asked, in a letter to Parliament President Antonio Tajani on Thursday 21 March, to withdraw access to Parliament from ExxonMobil until the oil giant agrees to appear before MEPs in a public forum.
This letter follows a public hearing of the Petitions (PETI) and Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI) Committees on the same day, in which the company refused to participate, although it focused in particular on ExxonMobil's concealment of information on the link between fossil fuels and global warming (see EUROPE 12219/16).
The Green MEPs thus refer to an article of the Parliament regulation introduced in 2016 (Article 116a(3)), according to which the access badge is removed from its holder when he "has refused to comply with a formal summons to attend a hearing or committee meeting or to cooperate with a committee of inquiry, without offering a sufficient justification".
As a reminder, in 2015, Martin Schulz, former President of the Parliament, pushed for the strengthening of the Parliament's internal legal arsenal, considering that the institution was "not fully equipped with the legal tools to address the issue of non-cooperative behaviour" (see EUROPE 11405/17).
If the Greens/EFA request is successful, ExxonMobil will join the agrochemical company Monsanto, which has been subject to such a ban since 28 September 2017 (see EUROPE 11872/30).
Consult the letter sent by the Greens/EFA: https://bit.ly/2YbYSg2 (Original version in French by Damien Génicot - intern)