Wednesday 19 May 2010

History blogging: Why is SCIFA still there?

Just details of EU history:

According to a Council document from June 2008 in which you find a summary of the preparatory work for the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty at that time (document version with handwritten comments), "many delegations" of EU member states thought that the SCIFA, the Council's Strategic Committee on Immigration, Frontiers and Asylum, should be abolished in order to streamline the Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) structures (see page 7).

However, in November 2009, right before the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, the Council decided to keep SCIFA until 2012.

This means that "many delegations" had changed their mind within one year regarding the streamlining of JHA structures.

2 comments:

martinned said...

Looking at the document you linked, I'd imagine the "many" delegations weren't sufficiently many to abolish SCIFA. (I'm not sure whether that would take a simple or a qualified majority.) Looking at the language in that paragraph, I'd guess that "many" refers to about 10-15 MS, with 5-10 more undecided and the final 5-10 against.

If there had been a QMV-sized majority in favour of abolishing this Committee, I'd think they would have written it down differently.

Anonymous said...

What about the Article 36 committee? AFAIK, it still exists, right?