In a motion for a resolution adopted on Wednesday 19 April in plenary session, the European Parliament once again called on the Council of the EU to unblock the horizontal directive for equal treatment.
“It is unacceptable that it has taken the Council over fourteen years to agree on something as fundamental as this. Parliament stands ready to adopt the directive, now it is time for the Council to do what should have been done years ago”, urged Alice Kuhnke (Greens/EFA, Swedish).
“We are witnessing an incapacity of the whole European decision and law-making process to bring an EU answer to sort out a major political issue, which is discrimination on the rise all over the place in the Member States and across the EU“, had deplored, as well, Juan Fernando López Aguilar (S&D, Spanish) in March, during a plenary debate.
‘Passerelle’ clause
The blockage stems in particular from the lack of unanimity between the Member States. To break the deadlock, the European Parliament therefore calls for the activation of the ‘passerelle’ clause, which would allow the unanimity vote to be replaced by a qualified majority vote in the EU Council.
However, in 2019, the European Commission had proposed to activate this clause in the areas of anti-discrimination and social protection. Already at that time, the Member States were moderately enthusiastic (see EUROPE 12356/16, 12237/3).
This reluctance was confirmed by Helena Dalli, European Commissioner for Equality, in March. According to her, “none of the alternative solutions “ explored by the Commission to unblock the text “appear to be a realistic option” (neither a passerelle clause nor an enhanced cooperation mechanism). “Still, we must not give up in the face of the obviously challenging situation”, she added.
Reasonable accommodation
The Swedish Minister for European Affairs, Jessika Roswall, who was also present in March, was not very optimistic. “The Presidency’s analysis is that a decisive breakthrough is unlikely in the near future. I realise that this message is not the preferred one, but it is in fact the situation”, she had stressed.
According to the latest progress report, reasonable accommodation for people with disabilities is the focus of disagreement between national delegations (see EUROPE 13071/17).
ID and ECR opposed
The motion for a resolution adopted therefore urges the Member States to relaunch the negotiations in order to take a position “by the end of this year”. Failing that, Parliament calls on the Commission to act, while stressing that “any update of the proposal for a horizontal anti-discrimination directive [...] must build on Parliament’s position, address intersectional discrimination and explicitly prohibit discrimination on any combination of grounds listed in the EU Charter (of Fundamental Rights)”.
Voted by a show of hands, the motion for a resolution was carried by the EPP, S&D, Renew Europe, Greens/EFA and The Left groups. The far-right group ID unsuccessfully introduced a parallel, but substantively diametrically opposed motion. For this group, the impasse reflects the lack of “political consensus” as well as the Commission’s stubbornness to push “its own political agenda“.
See the adopted text: https://aeur.eu/f/6e1 (Original version in French by Hélène Seynaeve)