Luxembourg, 17/01/2001 (Agence Europe) - The president of the Court of First Instance, Bo Vesterdorf, has rejected as inadmissible the action taken by twenty-two MEPs, headed by Gabriele Stauner (CSU), who had called on the Court to suspend application of the framework agreement on relations between the European Parliament and the European Commission. Bo Vesterdorf considers that the fact that the framework agreement provides for certain information only to be delivered to parliamentary instances does not prevent the members of the Parliament acting individually to put questions to the Commission and to obtain answers involving the transmission of confidential information, as was the case before adoption of the above-mentioned framework agreement. The president stressed that the framework agreement does not even indirectly bring into question the Commission's power of assessment for deciding whether to communicate essential information in its response to MEPs. On 5 July 2000, the Parliament had adopted most of the framework agreement, including Annex 3, which, say MEPs, restricts the rights conferred upon them in the Treaty (Article 197 ex 140) to put questions to the Commission and have these questions answered.
Then there is still the case in substance: the request for cancellation of the framework agreement still to be judged by the European Court of First Instance. The issue is theoretically uncertain, but, in practice, the Parliament and the Commission will take up the same arguments on inadmissibility that they used in the application for the adoption of interim measures.
The Parliament and the Commission pointed out that the MEPs were not individually concerned by the framework conditions (Ed.: one of the essential conditions for taking the matter before the Court) since the latter only has an effect on these two institutions (Parliament and Commission) which are the only parties to the agreement.
MEPs had challenged the provisions of the framework agreement concerning the transmission by the Commission of confidential information to the Parliament, in particular in the context of the control procedure for budgetary implementation (the budgetary discharge procedure granted by the EPP to the Commission).