Greens to keep up the pressure for reform in new Parliament

May was a fruitful month for the Greens-European Free Alliance (EFA). Just before boosting their EP representation to 69 seats, the group brought out a detailed report that points an accusing finger at the EU system of secondary legislation and calls for sweeping changes to how that system operates.

Whatever your philosophy or interests, it never hurts to confer a veneer of academic respectability upon your opinions, which is what the Greens-EFA group did earlier this year when they commissioned Cécile Robert of Sciences-Po Lyon to draw up a report entitled “The political use of expertise in EU decision-making: the case of comitology.”

The underlying motives are not hard to discern: many of the flashpoints that have flared up around comitology in recent times – GMOs, glyphosate, Dieselgate, endocrine disruptors – touch upon issues of public health and environmental safety that are central to the Green manifesto. Thus they have, collectively, been much more vocal on the topic compared to their peers in Strasbourg.

The Newsletter has always considered questions of policy substance to be above its station; what interests us above all are procedural matters and how comitology functions. In this regard, the Greens-commissioned study, despite its obvious ideological biases, makes an important contribution to the debate.

First, the report highlights a fundamental defect in the framework of secondary legislation, namely the tenuous (and at times, artificial) distinction between ‘the political’ and ‘the technical’. In theory, comitology is meant to deal only with the latter; the former is to be managed by the EU legislators. In practice, decisions taken at comitology level sometimes carry a strong political element. Worse, these measures can on occasion contradict the terms of the primary legislation under which they are adopted (the recent Court ruling on car emissions may be held up as an illustration).

Second, the author traces the roots of this problem to the perennial horse-trading between the three Institutions that regularly results in political issues getting pushed down into secondary legislation in the hope of avoiding legislative stalemate (a phenomenon dubbed the ‘cascade effect’ by certain experts).

Thirdly, the report laments the “instrumentalisation of expertise” whereby the parties most capable of making their views prevail in the comitology arena are those with the knowhow and the resources to do so – namely national officials and the private sector. NGOs and trade unions, by contrast, tend to get muscled out in their efforts to engage.

The overall conclusion is that the transparency and democracy of secondary legislation processes need to be improved, otherwise “a two-fold crisis of confidence” will see the public grow defiant against EU decisions and distrustful of the political system itself.

As for concrete proposals, the Greens-EFA group published alongside the report a summary of the changes they would like to see. Many of them are familiar to the Newsletter (details on how each Member State voted, no product approval without a QMV in favour); others however we had not seen before:

• Better attendance by Commission members at EP committee discussions on secondary legislation;

• Postponing the comitology process if the EP does not receive information within the required deadline;

• Systematic invitations for EP committee chairs to attend comitology committees and expert groups;

• Review by the EP and Council of general implementing powers if individual files constantly cause problems;

• Making primary legislation as detailed as possible in order to avoid shifting ‘political’ issues down to comitology.

Love or hate their policies, the reality is that few political groups within the Parliament have been as zealous as the Greens-EFA in working to keep the undeniable failings of the EU comitology process in the public eye. For that, they deserve plenty of kudos.

Many of their ideas make eminent sense. Secondary legislation should never be used to regulate overtly political matters, nor should it ever contradict the basic act. Minutes, participant names and country-by-country voting records ought to be systematically public. And the concept of reviewing implementing powers would be a very logical counterpart to the existing competence of revoking delegated powers.

However, the chicken-and-egg conundrum arises here. The Greens report alleges that the dysfunctioning of comitology generates public antipathy; the Newsletter would argue that it is the other way round. Broader distrust of scientific expertise (after all, these comitology committees are basing themselves on assessments made by independent EU agencies), along with vehement disagreements among civil society, stakeholders and governments over competing economic and agricultural models, have combined to bring the EU regulatory process to a standstill. No amount of procedural tweaking is going to untie that Gordian knot.

In any case, as the Parliament prepares to take up its new mandate, we can expect the Greens-EFA to continue fighting the good fight over the next five years and keep comitology firmly on the agenda.