Brussels, 16/12/2003 (Agence Europe) - Alain Lamassoure, Member of the European Parliament and of the European Convention, has put forward several proposals for reforming the European Parliament in a contribution to the Convention since he says the Parliament is not yet fully adapted to become the "place of the final decision" in the European Union alongside the Council that "mixes legislative activity and executive functions, and mixes them up". In his view, three reforms are needed:
Setting the maximum number of MEPs at 650. The Nice Treaty measures would lead to a Parliament of more than 700 MEPs, notes the UDF MEP, adding that the two chambers of the US Congress have 535 members. Moreover, MEPs should be distributed "in a way that better matches demographics, which is not always the case today".
Adopting a single form of voting, although the 2002 decision on EP elections still leaves too much room for manoeuvre for each Member States for one to be able to describe it as uniform voting. Lamassoure says the electoral system should be included in the constitution, based on proportional representation which corresponds to the "political tradition of the continent and the practice of all current members". However, in order to avoid constituencies being too big or artificial, each Member State electing more than a certain number of MEPs would have to use existing administrative regions as European constituencies.
Banning Parliament from moving beyond its sphere of competence. Alongside its co-legislative work (that it only started with the Single European Act in 1986), the EP still spends a considerable part of its timetable and "most impassioned debate" to issues that are not necessarily part of the EU's competence, noted Lamassoure. Adding that the resolutions adopted in this connection, although they do not have legal power, "can only be inconvenient to the national authorities in charge of the problems discussed", he feels that the EP should no longer give itself a "universal and permanent power of opinion". He says this could be achieved by "expressly giving the judge of the sharing of competencies (the Court of Justice or Constitutional Court) the power to approve ex ante or censure ex post the European Parliament's internal rules of procedure".