Wednesday 10 March 2010

What is an EU legislative act?

The debate about what the Lisbon Treaty actually means continues.

Now the conference of EU committees of member states' parliaments (COSAC) has raised the following question:
What is a "legislative acts" when it comes to the involvement of national and regional parliaments of EU member states?
This involvement is foreseen in Protocol N° 2 (on the application of the principles of subsidiarity) to the Lisbon Treaty. But if the EU will apply a very narrow interpretation of "legislative acts", the national legislatures might be left aside in quite a number of relevant matters.

This is why COSAC expects an answer on its question from European Council President van Rompuy until the end of May.

It's still amazing that these questions haven't been raised and answered before the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty - what were the parliaments doing when they agreed to the text...?


Follow-up: The legal status of procedures leading to international agreements

1 comments:

Jon Worth said...

Maybe because national parliaments (with the exceptions of only Denmark and Finland) are inherently lazy when it comes to dealing with any EU matters? And that the whole yellow card / orange card system in the treaty is going to be a waste of time as a result?