Suchergebnisse

This Working Paper analyses three trends in interparliamentary cooperation in the European Union (EU). All of them pertain to the notable increase in the number of interparliamentary meetings in recent years. First, there is a growing tendency towards functional specialization, with the creation of three new permanent interparliamentary bodies for specific policy fields – foreign and security policy, economic governance, and (prospectively) Justice and Home Affairs. Second, the EU Speakers Conference has lately consolidated its constitutive role as the body that oversees the creation of other forms of interparliamentary cooperation within the EU and also supervises their ongoing functioning. Third, more and more interparliamentary meetings are held within the framework of the 'Parliamentary Dimension' of the rotating Council Presidency; this gives a role to the 'Presidency Parliament' which acts as agenda-setter, host and chair of a series of interparliamentary meetings during the six-month period. The argument of this Working Paper is that the collective effect of these three trends has been to rationalize interparliamentary meetings within the EU, making them significantly more 'orderly'.

This Working Paper investigates whether the Early Warning Mechanism (EWM), in which national parliaments check the legislative proposals of the European Union (EU) for their subsidiarity compliance, is essentially a legal or a political procedure. This is closely related to the longstanding debate over whether the principle of subsidiarity itself is a legal or a political concept. Unpacking this debate reveals three distinct questions. First, should subsidiarity and the EWM be studied by legal scholars or political scientists? Second, should subsidiarity and the EWM be implemented by legal or political institutions? And third, do subsidiarity and the EWM entail a legal or a political mode of reasoning? A thoroughgoing theoretical and historical analysis shows that there is persistent disagreement among academic observers and political practitioners alike concerning the legal or political nature of the EWM. Building upon this analysis, it is possible to construct a typology of three approaches to subsidiarity and the EWM: Legal Rule-Following, Political Bargaining, and Policy Arguing.

First Online: 04 January 2016 ; Article 13 of the Fiscal Treaty (2012) prompted the creation of an interparliamentary conference to discuss and oversee the EU's post-crisis regime of economic governance. However, the first meeting of the 'Article 13 Conference', in October 2013, was beset by conflict. Surprisingly, the main cleavage was not a left–right debate over economic policy (for example, pro- versus anti-austerity), but a debate about the nature and purpose of the conference itself. This pitted the European Parliament (EP), preferring a weak conference with a narrow mandate, against a number of national parliaments that preferred a strong conference with a broad mandate. This cleavage was apparent in a series of constitutional, institutional and procedural disagreements that arose over the course of the setting-up of the Article 13 Conference, many of which remained unresolved even after its second and third meetings, in January and September 2014. At the root of this struggle lay competing visions for the parliamentary oversight of the EU: Should scrutiny be centralized in the EP, or should there be a new system of joint scrutiny involving the EP and national parliaments together?

Published online: 1 April 2015 ; Article awarded with the 2015 PADEMIA Award for Outstanding Research on Parliamentary Democracy in Europe ; In May 2012 national parliaments of the European Union (EU) issued their first yellow card under the Early Warning Mechanism of the Treaty of Lisbon. A sufficient number of them raised objections to a legislative proposal – the Monti II Regulation regarding the right to strike – that the Commission was required to review the proposal, which it subsequently withdrew. This outcome was, demonstrably, not a coincidence but the product of extensive interparliamentary co-ordination, enabled by the initiative of one determined parliament (Denmark's Folketing), the opportunity provided by a well-timed interparliamentary meeting, and the network of national parliament representatives in Brussels. A dynamic political process was set in motion in which a number of parliaments joined the effort to obtain a yellow card by, in effect, 'voting against' Monti II before the eight-week deadline. The episode shows that, despite claims to the contrary, national parliaments have the capacity and willingness to use their new powers to exercise a collective influence in EU affairs.

Background: Lyme disease (LD) is the most commonly reported, broadly distributed vector-borne disease of thenorthern temperate zone. It is transmitted by ticks and, if untreated, can cause skin, cardiac, nervous system and musculoskeletaldisease. The distribution and incidence of LD is increasing across much of North America and WesternEurope. Interventions to decrease exposure to LD hazard by encouraging behavioural change have low acceptancein high risk groups, and a safe, effective human LD vaccine is not presently available. As a result, habitat level interventionsto decrease LD hazard itself (i.e. levels of infected ticks) have been proposed. However, some interventions maypotentially negatively affect ecosystem health, and consequentially be neither desirable, nor politically feasible. Thissystematic review will catalogue interventions that aim to reduce LD hazard at non-domestic sites, and examine theevidence supporting those which are unlikely to negatively affect ecosystem health.Methods: The review will be carried out in two steps. First, a screening and cataloguing stage will be conducted toidentify and characterise interventions to decrease LD hazard at non-domestic sites. Secondly, the subset of interventionsidentified during cataloguing as unlikely to negatively affect ecosystem health will be investigated. In thescreening and cataloguing step literature will be collected through database searching using pre-chosen searchstrings, hand-searching key journals and reviewing the websites of public health bodies. Further references will beidentified by contacting stakeholders and researchers. Article screening and assessment of the likely effects of interventionson ecosystem health will be carried out independently by two reviewers. A third reviewer will be consultedif disagreements arise. The cataloguing step results will be presented in tables. Study quality will then be assessedindependently by two reviewers, using adapted versions of established tools developed in healthcare research. Theseresults will be presented in a narrative synthesis alongside tables. Though a full meta-analysis is not expected to bepossible, if sub-groups of studies are sufficiently similar to compare, a partial meta-analysis will be carried out.

In this paper, a susceptible-infected-removed (SIR) model has been used to track the evolution of the spread of COVID-19 in four countries of interest. In particular, the epidemic model, that depends on some basic character- istics, has been applied to model the evolution of the disease in Italy, India, South Korea and Iran. The economic, social and health consequences of the spread of the virus have been cataclysmic. Hence, it is imperative that math- ematical models can be developed and used to compare published datasets with model predictions. The predictions estimated from the presented methodology can be used in both the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the spread. They give an insight into the spread of the virus that the published data alone cannot, by updating them and the model on a daily basis. We show that by doing so, it is possible to detect the early onset of secondary spikes in infections or the development of secondary waves. We considered data from March to August, 2020, when different communities were affected severely and demonstrate predictions depending on the model's parameters related to the spread of COVID-19 until the end of December, 2020. By comparing the published data with model results, we conclude that in this way, it may be possible to reflect better the success or failure of the adequate measures implemented by governments and authorities to mitigate and control the current pandemic.

This multidisciplinary expert panel opinion on bacteriophage therapy has been written in the context of a society that is confronted with an ever increasing number of antibiotic resistant bacteria. To avoid the return to a pre-antibiotic era, alternative treatments are urgently needed. The authors aim to contribute to the opinion formation of relevant stakeholders on how to potentially develop an infrastructure and legislation that paves the way for the acceptance and re-implementation of bacteriophage therapy.