MEPs threaten to revive the freezing of committee funds

Date: 10/10/1996

THE European Parliament is threatening to torpedo the work of hundreds of influential EU committees by freezing their running costs completely next year unless MEPs are allowed to attend their meetings.

“If we do not get satisfaction on this final element of the four-part agreement we recently approved with the Commission and Council of Ministers, we could put all the committees' funds for 1997 into a reserve fund,” warned British Socialist MEP Terry Wynn.

The Parliament will finalise its tactics later this month when it gives its preliminary verdict on next year's overall EU budget, before formally approving the full spending estimates in December.

The looming showdown over the secretive committees' 20-million-ecu budget is part of a long-running parliamentary campaign to open up their work to greater public scrutiny.

Staffed by national civil servants and experts, the committees play a central role in the formulation and implementation of vast areas of Union policy.

The latest attack follows a partial agreement between MEPs, EU governments and the Commission which successfully defused earlier parliamentary threats to paralyse the work of the 361 committees until the end of this year.

Under the deal, the Parliament will receive agendas for committee meetings and the results of any votes taken.

Following allegations that certain vested interests were using the committees to advance their particular causes, it was agreed that, from now on, committee members who are not civil servants will have to sign a declaration of interests.

These concessions were enough to persuade MEPs to call a truce in this year's campaign and unfreeze the 10 million ecu which they had earlier placed in a blocked account.

If the Parliament had refused to release the money, meetings would have been cancelled or national governments themselves would have had to have shouldered delegates' costs - a burden which would have fallen heavily on the EU's peripheral members.

The same uncertainty now hangs over the committees' activities next year because of continued disagreement over the right of individual MEPs or parliamentary committees to attend their meetings.

Euro MPs argue that they should be allowed to participate unless delegates decide unanimously to deny them access and give explicit reasons for doing so.

But the Commission and Council place a different interpretation on this part of the recent agreement, maintaining that MEPs may only attend if committee members unanimously agree to their presence.