The European Commission drew the ire of MEPs when it unveiled in mid-September the outline of the European Health Emergency Response Authority, HERA (see EUROPE 12792/24).
While most of the groups consider the initiative to be positive in substance, they all deplored the way it was conceived in form on Monday 27 September in the parliamentary committee. This starts with the EPP, which—unlike the S&D, Renew Europe and the Greens/EFA—has so far kept a low profile on the subject.
The European Parliament will have no say in the implementation of HERA, which will not require the traditional legislative procedure to be followed. Only the EU Council will be asked about certain aspects of the future authority.
But beyond that, MEPs are particularly disappointed with the role they have been given in the project, which is broadly limited to an observational role on the HERA board and control of its expenditure.
“I believe that we will have to look at the rights of the European Parliament and that the Commission and its legal services must explain the situation more clearly from a legal point of view”, stressed EPP rapporteur Peter Liese from Germany.
Sweden’s Jytte Guteland, speaking on behalf of the S&D group, said she did not understand why Parliament was not offered a seat at the negotiating table after having demonstrated its ability to legislate quickly and even urgently in recent months.
“We wish to participate actively in the governance of HERA, in its Steering Board, in its crisis committee. This is how we can guide its actions and decisions. Parliament cannot and should not be confined to adopting a budget”, insisted Véronique Trillet-Lenoir (France), for Renew Europe.
The MEP also stressed the inconsistency between “reducing the European Parliament to the role of observer” and the Commission’s “unity and cooperation” rhetoric, especially at the time of the Conference on the Future of Europe.
The Greens/EFA group denounced an “authority tailored to the wishes of the pharmaceutical industry”.
“This was never about exclusion”.
The Commission was certainly expecting to have to deal with a particularly angry parliamentary committee, as it was its Health Commissioner, Stella Kyriakides, who appeared before MEPs on Monday, and not the Director General of DG Health or the Deputy Director General, as had been envisaged at one point.
The Commissioner also repeated many times in her initial speech that “this was never about the exclusion” of the European Parliament.
She then essentially put forward the arguments already detailed in the HERA presentation (see EUROPE 12792/24), repeating that the Commission had chosen an internal service for reasons of efficiency.
“If we had chosen an autonomous agency, it would have taken several years to set up and it would not have had the powers and flexibility of a Commission department”, the Commissioner stressed, insisting that this configuration made it easy to find the necessary budget and staff.
This last point raises questions in Parliament, where some fear that units devoted to other aspects of health policy will be deprived of their staff in favour of HERA.
Regarding the legal bases of the project, Ms Kyriakides also recalled that only Article 122 of the TFEU gave the Commission the possibility to act in this way in the face of health emergencies.
Finally, she confirmed the fears raised by Ms Trillet-Lenoir, assuring that HERA could not legally be mentioned in the regulation currently being negotiated between the Parliament and the EU Council on the Union’s response to cross-border threats to health (see EUROPE 12792/12)—of which HERA will be the future centrepiece. (Original version in French by Agathe Cherki)