On Monday 29 June, the Members of the European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties (LIBE) addressed a series of recommendations to the European Commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders, regarding the presentation by the European Commission, next September, of its first ever annual report on the Rule of law.
While Slovak MEP Michal Šimečka (Renew Europe) will present a report at the end of July on the Rule of law mechanism that the European Parliament has been calling for since 2016 (see EUROPE 11654/1), committee members wanted to know whether the Commission's report will be sufficiently comprehensive and how it will be linked with tools such as Article 7 of the Treaty, under which proceedings have been opened, at this stage, against Poland and Hungary.
Some of them stressed the importance of European budget conditionality in this debate. The Slovak MEP will, in any case, present a report in which he will say that any future European mechanism on the Rule of law must cover all “the fundamental values enshrined in Article 2 of the Treaty”.
He also wants an Interinstitutional Agreement to surround this Rule of law mechanism, so that the “three institutions have the responsibility” to defend these European values.
It will also be necessary to succeed in reconciling and even “going beyond” the current tools that exist “but are fragmented”.
In front of MEPs, the Commissioner for Justice promised that future work would be as inclusive as possible and treat all Member States equally. The mechanism on the Rule of law, based on this famous report on the 27 Member States, will also be able to involve the national parliaments, with which debates on the situation in the country can be conducted.
The Commissioner, however, explained that he was not in a position to accept the European Parliament's 2016 suggestion to have the Rule of law in the EU assessed by an independent external body. If the Commission were to rely on a series of external sources, the OECD or OSCE having already contributed to the September report, “this [would] pose a problem of legitimacy”. “An external analysis is no substitute for the analysis made by the Commission”.
The Commission's report will be comprehensive, he told MEPs, even if the first report will only cover three main areas: corruption issues, media pluralism and the state of democratic checks and balances, including independence of the judiciary, the Commissioner confirmed.
On a practical level, the work is progressing well, he added. More than 300 videoconference consultations have already taken place with different actors involved, authorities or civil society, and new virtual visits to member countries are still on the agenda.
The September plan will also take into account the pandemic and the way it has been managed; some emergency measures had worried the Commission. Most of them have now been lifted. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)