Sunday 14 March 2010

The involvement of the European Parliament: International agreements

Jerzy Buzek, the President of the European Parliament, has written a letter to José Luis Zapatero, the current President of the second legislative chamber of the EU asking for an interinstitutional agreement regarding the involvement of the parliament in international negotiations.

The recent vote on the SWIFT agreement has shown that the European Parliament has gained significant powers under the Lisbon Treaty.

And so Buzek does not only demand that the parliament gets three months to assess whether it wants to agree to international agreements, but also that
"if the Parliament is to have a right of veto over agreements which contain 'classified' components, as the Lisbon Treaty now allows, then it follows logically that the Parliament needs to be in a position to make a considered and serious judgment about the content and significance of such elements."
In other words: The European Parliaments wants to be involved in time and it wants to have access to all relevant documents. This request may implicitly refer to the ACTA secrecy but will be important for a lot of international agreements that the EU is dealing with.

The strange thing: Why do I have to learn about this letter from the Council document register and not from the EP president himself (e.g. in his news section or his Twitter account)?

4 comments:

Julien Frisch said...

Eurotribune.eu has taken up the story, two days after this post appeared. Naturally without any reference. Journalists don't need to reference online sources.

josepsolano said...

Dear Mr. Frisch,

We received this letter by other sources previous to your post. There's no problem to reference anyone and anybody as proved here.

Best regards,

eurotribune.eu team

Julien Frisch said...

Dear Josep,

thanks for reacting - I sincerely excuse for the unjustified allegations!

Still then wondering why it took two days longer to publish it when you had it earlier than I.

Plus you still didn't mention any source in your initial post. When I proposed on Twitter that you could link the actual letter, you used the link I had dug up.

Nevertheless: Sorry for my arrogance!

josepsolano said...

Dear Julien,

no need to excuse. I saw no arrogance in your post, so it was just an error. It has no importance!

Sometimes journalists we keep some hours (or days) informations. I usually have one or two news "in the fridge" (as we say) to publish them when "there's nothing interesting", sometimes at 8am, as you can see in our journal. That's the reason why sometimes some news take some hours or days to appear(at least in eurotribune). You can see it today in our first article, for example, but also yesterday or Monday.

When you wrote me on twitter I saw your link and thanked you, if I remember correctly.

Sometimes I receive some mails with interesting information but senders are movie stars like Dustin Hoffman or Jean-Paul Belmondo... obvious people that they don't want to be recognized. I respect this and, of course, I protect my sources. One of this sources is your excellent blog; I will continue reading. I promise I will do it more often.

Thank you very much !!