During the debate on the draft report aimed at reforming the ethics rules for MEPs on Tuesday 18 July in the European Parliament’s Committee on Constitutional Affairs (AFCO), the rapporteur, Gabriele Bischoff (S&D, German), and representatives of the Renew Europe, Greens/EFA and The Left groups called for the reform on the table, the result of an informal agreement between political groups (see EUROPE 13220/28), to strengthen the powers or composition of the internal advisory committee responsible for advising the European Parliament President in the event of breaches of the MEPs’ code of conduct.
My “personal feeling”, said Ms Bischoff, is that the Advisory Committee “could be further strengthened”, especially if there is no European Ethics Committee in the near future, by empowering it to “call in experts” and “report offences and wrongdoing to speed up investigations”.
The draft ‘Bischoff’ report does not really affect the Advisory Committee because such a reform was not included in the fourteen measures identified by European Parliament President Roberta Metsola and validated at the beginning of 2023 by the Conference of Presidents (CoP) of the political groups (see EUROPE 13224/6). It simply asks the Advisory Committee to proactively monitor MEPs’ compliance with the rules in force and to report any breaches to the President of the European Parliament. Similarly, the President of the European Parliament will have to refer to the committee any failure by an MEP to comply with the enhanced transparency rules.
The Advisory Committee is made up of five sitting MEPs. It is criticised for its lack of transparency and monitoring of individual cases transferred to it.
On behalf of the Renew Europe group, French MEP Gilles Boyer said he would be tabling amendments on the role of this committee.
Negotiating on behalf of the Greens/EFA group, French MEP Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield praised the work carried out upstream, which had gone “very far on issues of transparency”, but not far enough on the question of compliance with the rules, especially on “the prerogatives and composition of the advisory committee”.
On the question of the financial or administrative penalties incurred by an MEP, she pointed out the lack of clarity on the nature of the penalty depending on the type of offence committed. Like her German counterpart, Daniel Freund, she called for rules to govern the declaration of assets, so as to be able to detect any sudden enrichment that was not in line with remuneration. Finally, she said, we need a “review” clause in the rules to keep this debate alive during the 2024-2029 legislature and rectify the situation if necessary.
For The Left Group, Germany’s Helmut Scholz also did not rule out tabling amendments to the Advisory Committee.
Of the group representatives who spoke on Tuesday, only the German Christian Rainer Wieland felt that the working group had gone as far as it could on the European Parliament’s Advisory Committee.
Any amendment to Parliament’s Rules of Procedure requires the support of an absolute majority of MEPs. The draft report will be voted on by the AFCO Committee on Thursday 7 September, before a vote in plenary in September.
See the draft ‘Bischoff’ report: https://aeur.eu/f/7zz (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)