Members of the European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties (LIBE) will start voting on Monday 21 September on amendments to the report by Slovak MEP Michal Šimečka (Renew Europe) on the establishment of a Union mechanism for democracy, the rule of law and fundamental rights, aimed at merging together some of the existing tools for 'monitoring' the rule of law in the Member States. The final report will be voted on 22 September.
The Rapporteur explained on 2 September that he had received 300 amendments and was unable to respond favourably to a large number of them, with 1/3 of these requests for modifications “calling into question the very purpose of this Mechanism”.
As the Commission is due to present its first annual report on the rule of law in all Member States at the end of this month and EU European Affairs Ministers will resume their discussions on Poland and Hungary on 22 September (see EUROPE 12562/21), the Mechanism advocated by the Slovak rapporteur will have to “consolidate and replace existing instruments, in particular the annual report on the rule of law, the Commission's Rule of Law Framework, the EU Council's Rule of Law Dialogue and the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM)”, while “enhancing complementarity and coherence with other available tools, including infringement proceedings under Article 7 TEU, the European Semester and budgetary conditionality, once it is in force”.
This mechanism, requested by the European Parliament since 2016, is an annual monitoring cycle covering all the values set out in Article 2 of the Treaty. It will contain “country-specific recommendations, with timelines and targets for their implementation, to be followed up in annual reports”. Concrete coercive measures would be taken in the event of failure to follow up on the recommendations.
The Commission has recently been questioned by the LIBE elected representatives on the risks of overlapping and loss of visibility, as so many tools are available.
The rapporteur therefore calls for this annual monitoring cycle to “fulfil the objectives of the CVMs for Bulgaria and Romania, thus contributing to equal treatment between all Member States”. However, the Commission had indicated that it would still have to keep these two tools for Bulgaria and Romania (see EUROPE 12557/25).
In any case, the amendments made insist in particular on respect for national minorities and the effective independence of the judiciary or call for the outright deletion of certain passages, such as those directly criticising Hungary and Poland, or even passages defending the mechanism itself (amendments by the ID and ECR Groups). Others also call for an end to the unanimity rule in Article 7 procedures.
Link to amendments: https://bit.ly/32HeTPb (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)