EU member states delay trilogue transparency

This Council document (item 5c) reads like EU member states want to delay increased transparency of EU law-making by trilogues*:

The Presidency informed delegations on the outcome of the General Affairs Council on transparency issues. … Regarding trilogues, the President indicated that discussions had shown the need to balance transparency with the efficiency of the decision-making process and that further discussions were needed.

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* Trialogues is EU language for: behind-closed-doors meetings of Parliament, Council and Commission to compromise on new EU laws before first reading without providing any public protocols.

Where the stories are born

Many have asked me how I get ideas for blog posts, and the truth is that almost everything I've been writing about has come to me via public sources on the web - nothing anybody else couldn't do.

A lot of the stories on this blog - almost all 143 previous posts under the label Council of the European Union - have been born by going through the EU Council RSS feed of Latest Public Documents which can be found in the long list of Council RSS feeds that you may also want to follow if you'd like to get an idea of what the member states are actually (not) doing in different policy areas.

Since the stream usually also includes Commission documents (like Communications) sent to the Council, you also get hold of what the Commission is sending publically to the Council and the Parliament.

I'm still amazed talking to journalists here in Brussels who are not even using this kind of source. With a little extra research, a Council document can easily become a full story, especially when you have good contacts.

But often one fresh original document already tells more than 10 press releases (here's the latest example on this blog)...

PS: If you still don't know what RSS is and why you need that, I recommend reading Jon's post on the matter.

EU Council with new website design

It is incredible, but the Council of the European Union has a newly designed website. I got so much used to the old 1998-style of the portal that I cannot believe that they actually did this.

The style is equal to that of the European Council - probably the test ground (or the place where they realised that a new design was actually possible). A first quick look into the content makes me feel that the basic structure and content isn't changed, except probably for the digital press room.

It looks nice, that is for sure.

However, the most important change regarding that would be necessary is that the different Council configurations are filled with life. I want to click on the Agriculture Council and find all meeting documents, news, photos etc. (including the work of the Working Parties) available instead of heaving to search for them with a lot of efforts in the Council document register.

Speaking about the register that is linked under "Documents" in the main menu, I'd recommend that you don't need to click through four links until you actually can search for documents. Why not having a search right after clicking on "Documents"?

But let's not complain, it's already nice to see that the Council has moved into the 21st century, at least in website design. Waiting now for more transparency in its general work...

The EU's accession to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR): EU fails proper coordination in the Council of Europe

It is rare that public EU documents actually give an insight into failures at diplomatic or bureaucratic level, and so the publishing of this Council document regarding the negotiations of the EU accession to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is one of the few valuable exceptions.

The document makes clear that while the EU Council in Brussels has been deciding upon a negotiation mandate for the EU Commission regarding the EU accession to the European Convention on Human Rights (for the background see all posts on this blog under the label "ECHR"), co-ordination outside Brussels seems to be bad.

The EU member states' experts of a major Council of Europe* steering committee (similar to a Working Party in the EU Council), the CDDH, seemed to be so poorly co-ordinated that some of them, if I read the above-mentioned document correctly, voiced positions in a committee meeting that were even against the EU negotiation mandate:

"[I]t should be noted that individual delegates of EU Member States at the CDDH meeting openly questioned in statements in particular the following negotiating directives (to be noted that the Ministers had adopted them 12 days before the meeting of the CDDH):

a) The principle contained in 1 e) – that the Union should be allowed to participate in the ECtHR as well as other Council of Europe bodies to the extent that their activities are linked to the purpose of the ECtHR on an equal footing.

b) Directive 6 that the EU should have its own judge with the same status and duties of the other Contracting Parties.

c) That an appropriate number of members of the EP should be allowed to participate in sessions of the Parliamentary Assembly of the CoE when the latter exercises functions related to the application of the Convention (especially elections) (directive 7).

d) That the Union should be allowed to participate in meetings of the Committee of Ministers and to vote when the latter exercises its role in relation to the Convention (directive 8).

e) The necessity of having a co-respondent mechanism (directive 10 b).

Funny enough, this document thereby also reveals more details about the negotiation mandate that is kept secret by the EU.

And, when you read the rest of the text, you can also see that the Spanish EU Council presidency who has issued the document doesn't seem to understand the kind of special structure that is supposed to be created within the Council of Europe to sort out the legal questions linked to the EU's accession to the ECHR, which shows that the Presidency was unable to build or maintain proper information relations to its own national experts who are sitting in the respective committee in the Council of Europe.

In short, this special structure will be an informal sub-committee of the CDDH steering committee with 14 members, 7 from the EU and 7 from other Council of Europe member states plus someone from the EU Commission. Some more details are explained in paragraph 11 of this meeting document of the Bureau of the CDDH and the composition of the group is mentioned in the EU Council document.

For the Spanish presidency it seems to be unclear how this special committee will function in practice. I wonder why they only realise this now as the CDDH bureau meeting document is already from 7 April 2010, and the composition and tasks of the group are clearly mentioned in there. Spain should have had enough time to figure everything out - but apparently they are not able to manage this properly.

Now I suppose that for many of you this will have sounded like Chinese, but I assure you that if we knew more stuff of this kind through public documents we would actually understand why the EU and international organisations are often unable to deliver good results:

They have become so complex that a proper co-ordination is almost impossible - and let's not even speak about democratic control!

* Note: the Council of Europe is based in Strasbourg and is not part of the EU system but is the 47 member states strong international organisation built around the European Convention on Human Rights

The European Citizens' Initiative: Council amendments - updated

Some days ago, I've already reported that the Council has come to a general agreement regarding the regulation of the European Citizens' Initiative (ECI).

Now I took a look back into the agenda of the Council meeting of 14 June and then into the Council document register and found the actual document (Update: 2nd revised version of 22 June) with the concrete changes that the Council proposed regarding the Commission draft.

Very interesting is, for example, the proposed new introductory clause 11a:

The Commission is encouraged to promote the development of an open source software which will provide the technical and security features necessary for complying with the provisions of this regulation as regards the online collect systems.

What is also significant is the list of possible identification documents/numbers that are listed for each member state from page 24, which, if I recall correctly, was not in the initial draft.

I'd recommend going through the whole document to follow all proposed changes; I suppose that this is particularly interesting for the Members of the European Parliament involved in the drafting process (saw for example that ALDE organises a seminar on the ECI implementation tomorrow).

The European Citizens' Initiative: Council agreement on draft regulation

As informed in a press release (via @lacomeuropeenne), the Council agreed on its version of the European Citizens' Initiative regulation today.

The main points mentioned in the press release are:

1. The Council wants signatures from at least 1/3 of the member states.
2. ECI organisers need to send in information about funding and support.
3. The Commission checks admissibility after 100,000 signatures

Except for the latter point, this seems to be following the Commission proposal; what is not mentioned are the Council's ideas for the online collection system that was still controversial in April.

European Parliament staff statistics by nationality and grade

Earlier this year, the Spanish EU Council Presidency has written a letter to the Secretary General of the European Parliament, Klaus Welle, asking for detailed staff statistics of the European Parliament Secretariat in the same way as the EP wants these statistics from the Council.

One month later, Klaus Welle now has presented his answer: 7652 people work for the European Parliament secretariat (there are about 3400 people working for the Council Secretariat, see here).

And here is the breakdown of total staff figures by EU country (note that also other nationalities work in the EP!) ignoring the distribution by grade (see link above for the details):

Austrian - 98
Belgian - 955
British - 382
Bulgarian - 156
Cypriot - 28
Czech - 165
Danish - 185
Dutch - 230
Estonian - 105
Finnish - 219
French - 852
German - 656
Greek - 297
Hungarian - 210
Irish - 126
Italian - 703
Latvian - 114
Lithuanian - 125
Luxembourgish - 144
Maltese - 73
Polish - 320
Portuguese - 312
Romanian - 218
Slovak - 145
Slovenian - 117
Spanish - 503
Swedish - 184

The Stockhom Games: Malmström equalises against the Council

10 days ago I reported that the Council looked very unhappy with the Stockholm Programme Action Plan that Malmström had proposed not long before.

The reaction from the Commission (in the annex) doesn't look very friendly either, at least when you read between the diplomatic lines.

The translated version: Go f*** yourself! We heard your complaints but we didn't do anything wrong; to the contrary: we did what citizens and the Parliament expected from us!*

And so they threw the staplers back to towards the Council to equalise in the Stockholm games that will keep going on...

* This is a very rough translations. Commission officials are trained not to speak like this in public, so I am just making a rough guess.

What are the terms of reference of Russia?

Sometimes EU document titles make me smile. Like this one.

PS: The comments are free to guess what the terms of reference of Russia are.

21st century archiving in the Council

Can somebody explain to me why the Council publishes a badly scanned black-and-white version of the Europol "EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report (TE-SAT) 2010" that is available in a similar size in the searchable original coloured version on the Europol website?

Thanks.

Zero energy

There are draft Council Conclusions titled "Towards a new Energy Strategy for Europe 2011-2020" but the document doesn't contain any substance regarding energy policy.

My conclusion: The member states cannot even agree on basic things in the field of energy so far.

An academic look at the Council Secretariat

Careful readers of this blog will have noticed that I am quite interested in the work of the EU Council, especially because there is a lack of attention on the work of this institution, and so I'd like to share some academic insights about the EU Council's secretariat that a fellow political scientist, Hylke Dijkstra, has published in recent time.

It is true that there is hardly any attention to the Council's bureaucracy with its more than 3400 staff members* (that is more than 10% of the Commission staff); when the Council is in the focus, attention usually is on the member states, their ministers and diplomats or on the rotating Council presidency but not on those people who facilitate and influence the work of the Council in the background.

Hylke Dijkstra thus takes a look behind these coulisses of Brussels, a look that very few academics have done so far, and it's fascinating to read.

I was made aware of Dijkstra's research through his newly published scientific article "Explaining variation in the role of the EU Council Secretariat in first and second pillar policy-making" (full text only with subscription) in the latest issue of the Journal of European Public Policy, a leading political science journal especially regarding EU affairs.

In his article, Dijkstra does not only give a short and concise summary of the evolution of the Council secretariat but also shows that the ways the secretariat is involved in different policy areas differs significantly.

He concludes that in the fields of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) - the second pillar - it has played a much more substantive role than just being a "secretariat" that facilitates continuity and decision-making between the member states in the Council. It was able to set the agenda, even in its own self-interest, and could thus influence the evolution and course of the Union's foreign and security policy more than the member states-focused approach of the media was able to tell us.

As usual, this is part of continued academic work, and not the first article published on that matter. For example, Dijkstra's article "The Council Secretariat's Role in the Common Foreign and Security Policy" (linked: pre-submission version) has been awarded the prize for the best article of 2008 in the European Foreign Affairs Review.

In another paper (accessible) from 2008 he has analysed the rivalries between the Commission's bureaucracy and the Council Secretariat by showing how the respective competencies in the field of foreign affairs have evolved over time. This is also great background knowledge for observers of the development of the new European External Action Service (EEAS), because it puts the present discussions about the "unification" of EU foreign policy into a historic perspective of division and overlap, co-operation and competition.

I myself have blogged in the past (quite polemically, I admit) about the legal service of the Council, and I think the role the Secretariat played and plays both in foreign relations as well as in other substantive areas of EU politics should not be underestimated. For anyone interested in more details it may thus be of interest to go through the publication list of Hylke Dijkstra and to take note of the few other academic publications on the Council Secretariat that he quotes in his papers.

On a side-note: When I passed by the Secretary General of the Council, Pierre de Boissieu, last week on a public place in Brussels, I could be sure that people around wouldn't even notice him and the powers he has. But you could feel his presence and the presence of his secretariat when he walked by, tall and concentrated.

De Boissieu will be in office for exactly 13 more months, and with the creation of the EEAS the powers of his secretariat will become smaller, given that only some 50 officials of those dealing with foreign and security affairs will remain in the Council structures (figure is from Dijkstra). It will therefore be quite interesting to see how the role of the Council Secretariat will change once it has lost parts of its competencies and once the long-time Brussels insider de Boissieu will be replaced by the "outsider" Uwe Corsepius.

Altogether, academic works like that of Dijkstra are much appreciated because they offer us a view beyond that of daily news while keeping an eye to what is actually relevant for daily politics - political science at it's best**.

* This figure is from the 2009 EU General Budget (via Dijkstra); in the 2010 budget [p.111] the figure is >3500 for both EU and European Council.

** "At it's best" is meant regarding substance and focus. I won't bother you with the questions I have regarding research methods.

Council is unhappy with Cecilia Malmström

It looks like Cecilia Malmström doesn't have too many fans in the Council.

Because if I read the diplomatic language of the Draft Council Conclusions on the Stockholm Action Plan, a plan that Commissioner Malmström presented last month, correctly, then the EU Council is punching the Commissioner right in her face*.

My translation of the draft conclusions into everyday language would be this:

"The document you presented is rubbish and incomplete, and we will only work with the original Stockholm Program."

I don't recall having seen such clear comments in a diplomatic text for a while...

* Note: This is an exaggeration for the purpose of dramatising the blog post. Usually, Council bureaucrats/diplomats would probably prefer to throw with staplers.

Anti-...WHAT?

You want to hear a good joke? Yes?! Here it comes: "Progress Report"!

The first time that I wrote about this proposal for a new anti-discrimination directive was in August 2008; the proposal itself is from 2 July 2008, the second day of this blog. I've followed up with two more blog posts in December 2008 and in July 2009.

When you look into the progress report linked above, it doesn't seem like there has been any real progress since 2008.

In my first post about the draft directive in August 2008 I said: "Looks like this document will have some way to go."

I admit that I had underestimated the sense of "long way to go" at that time.

ECI: State of discussions in the Council

The debates around the regulation of the European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) continue in the EU Council.

Following the identification of key issues (my report), discussions in the Council show that member states seem to be split over most of these key issues.

In a Council document published yesterday, one can see that EU member states have diverging opinions on the admissibility check, regarding the personal data needed with the signature to an ECI and to the online collection system.

The main debate seems to be over the question of personal data and online collection of signatures.

Some member states apparently complained that for administrative reasons they won't be able to quickly check whether online collection systems from ECI organisers fulfil the required specification. Because of these questions, the Council has decided to organise an expert meeting that will try to resolve these differences.

One thing that seems to be consensus among the member states is that they don't want to give delegated power to the Commission in specifying the details of the citizens initiative as formulated in the Annexes 2-8 of the draft regulation, which means that any future revision of the technical details of the ECI except for the number of signatures needed per country would need to go through the decision-making process of the Council and the Parliament.

Seeing the differences between the member states I have doubts that there will be a regulation until the end of the autumn, in particular since after the Council has a first position there will have to be an agreement between the Parliament and the Council.

The regulation of regulations

Many have said much about the plan that was made to save the Euro and the Union.

But why say so much when it can be said as cold-blooded as in Article 1 of the regulation that has changed the Union:

"With a view to preserving the financial stability of the European Union, this Regulation establishes the conditions and procedures under which Union financial assistance may be granted to a Member State which is experiencing, or is seriously threatened with, a severe economic or financial disturbance caused by exceptional occurrences beyond its control, taking into account the possible application of the existing facility providing medium-term financial assistance for non-euro-area Member States' balances of payments, as established by Regulation (EC) No 332/2002."

These are the words that are worth 60,000,000,000 Euro (this sum is not mentioned anywhere in the regulation) and they are followed by words in the second article that are probably historic in the constitutional history of the European Union:

"[T]he Commission shall be empowered on behalf of the European Union to contract borrowings on the capital markets or with financial institutions."

Just to repeat that: A regulation by one institution, the Council, gives new fundamental, quasi-constitutional powers to the another institution of the European Union, the Commission, namely to make debts on the financial markets.

In other words, the Council has given itself the quasi-constitutional right to create quasi-constitutional rights for the Commission. In a meeting that lasted just half a day.

Let's face it: This is the "regulation of regulations".

Picture: © tpcom / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The secret five - observations on the COSI meeting of 30 April 2010

COSI, the Standing Committee on operational cooperation on internal security, has met on 30 April to discuss issues like the protection of the EU's external borders or the cooperation between the internal security agencies of the EU.

What we see in the summary of discussions of the meeting is that the public is not trusted to know what the committee is working on in detail.

Take the summary of agenda item 5:

"The meeting reached consensus on the Presidency proposal (doc. 8852/10 COSI 24 ASIM 48 FRONT 57 COMIX 321) regarding the involvement of COSI in the implementation of 5 out of the 29 measures set out in the above-mentioned Council Conclusions. The COSI Support Group was invited to submit to the next COSI meeting concrete proposals for COSI's involvement in the identified measures and delegations were invited to indicate their willingness to participate in the elaboration and implementation of these proposals."

In this summary, we are directed to a non-public "Presidency proposal" (I've added the link) that seems to give guidance on how to deal with 29 measures proposed by the Council in February (see the Council conclusions).

But instead of telling us which are the 5 of the 29 measures to will be dealt with, COSI keeps it secret from us.

In other words: The ministers have agreed on a public list of 29 measures regarding FRONTEX, but the non-elected officials sitting in COSI keep secret from us what they are doing with these measures. Brilliant!

The innovative Council

When I read "EU", "Council", "Presidency", and "innovation" I expect exactly this kind of document.

INNOVATION?!

ECJ case-law involving the Council in the 2nd half of 2009

A freshly published document that could be interesting for all EU-law geeks:

"Case-law of the Court of Justice of the EU in cases involving the Council (1 July to 31 December 2009)"

The full list of cases is in the annex.

Council live streaming & tender statistics

The EU Council needs a new video & audio streaming provider.

This news was spread by the great new voice of the EU Council administration on Twitter, @Dana_Council, and this news is connected to an official tender that runs until 24 May 2010.

The whole tender linked above is interesting to read because it tells a lot about the audiovisual needs of the Council of the European Union, both for external but also for internal communication.

One of details mentioned in the tender that I'd like to highlight are the unique visitors statistics of the Council's present streaming platform for the last three years:

in 2007, 3 000 for live streaming and 16 000 for on-demand;
in 2008, 5 000 for live streaming and 11 000 for on-demand;
in 2009, 13 000 for live streaming and 35 000 for on-demand.

I'm no expert in web statistics but I'd say that these are pretty bad figures for an institution that represents 500 million citizens and unites governments of 27 member states with tens of thousands of national officials.

There is a lot of room for improvement.

It is thus to hope that the new streaming provider will deliver high-quality and easy-to-use services, with good searchability and intelligent tagging, making it easy to find content and to use it for ex post reporting, but also that the Council will show more transparency and make more of its work visible to the citizens of the Union through audiovisual media.

The only questions I ask myself are: Why is this just a tender for the Council and not a joint tender for all EU institutions? Wouldn't it be intelligent to have a common audiovisual platform for all the institutions?

But it's probably business as usual - institutional ego before public service...