Suchergebnisse

Abstract
In 2017, a new Joint Parliamentary Scrutiny Group (JPSG) was created to enable members of the national parliaments of the EU and the European Parliament to exercise joint oversight of the EU agency for police cooperation (Europol). This paper chronicles and explains the lengthy legal and political process leading up to the first meeting of the Europol JPSG in October 2017, and the establishment of its Rules of Procedure at its second meeting in March 2018. In addition, the Europol JPSG is compared to the three EU inter-parliamentary conferences (IPCs) which meet twice-yearly to discuss EU affairs, foreign policy and economic governance. While there are many similarities, the JPSG differs from these others in that it has an explicit mandate to scrutinize, and the target of its scrutiny is a specific EU agency rather than a whole policy field. The JPSG is also distinctive in a number of key respects, including a stronger legal basis, more restrictive membership and participation rules, greater continuity of membership, stronger access to EU officials and documents, a seat on the Europol Management Board and an explicit right to ask oral and written questions. Taken together, these attributes indicate that the JPSG is designed to be an oversight body, rather than merely a discussion forum. Finally, the paper considers the likely future UK role in relation to the Europol JPSG after Brexit.

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?