MEPs gain a consultative role in future nuclear energy deals

Date: 23/07/1998

By Myles Neligan

THE European Commission has defused an inter-institutional conflict by bowing to MEPs' demands for a greater say in international nuclear energy deals.

The dispute had threatened the EU's financial contributions towards efforts to promote safe nuclear energy in the volatile state of North Korea.

But the European Parliament's budget committee is now about to release the Union's 1998 contribution to the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organisation (KEDO), an international body set up in 1995 to finance safer alternatives to North Korea's weapons-convertible nuclear power plants.

The committee withheld the EU's annual 15-million-ecu payment last month in a bid to force the Commission and national governments to agree to an overhaul of the 1957 Euratom Treaty, which gives the Parliament no say in nuclear energy matters.

The emerging new deal stops short of a full inter-institutional agreement giving MEPs a formal consultative role, which is what the Parliament was pushing for.

But following negotiations between MEPs and Trade Commissioner Sir Leon Brittan, Commission President Jacques Santer has provided written assurances that the Parliament will be fully consulted over all international nuclear energy deals.

While some Euro MPs on the budget committee are seeking further clarification of what this will mean in practice, Parliament President José María Gil-Robles has thrown his weight behind the Commission's offer, urging his colleagues to accept the deal. "A solution is imminent," said a Brittan aide.

MEPs confirm that Santer's guarantee of wider consultation is enough to persuade them to release the blocked funds, but stress that they are less than fully satisfied with the result.

"We will take the money out of the budgetary reserve, but this does not completely settle the issue," said Dutch Liberal MEP Laurens Jan Brinkhorst.

"Without an inter-institutional agreement, we do not have cast-iron guarantees that the Commission will stick to its undertaking to consult us. If it transpires that the Commission is not fulfilling its pledge, we reserve the right to block KEDO contributions in subsequent years."

However, there are growing doubts over the legality of the budget committee's stance.

Sources say that the Parliament's own legal service concluded last week that since the Euratom Treaty does not require parliamentary consultation, the committee does not have the right to withhold KEDO contributions and would probably lose its case if one of the other institutions chose to refer the matter to the European Court of Justice.

The new arrangement has nonetheless been welcomed by many MEPs who regard it as a vital step in correcting what they see as an indefensible democratic deficit in EU nuclear energy policy.

Euro MPs from the Netherlands and the Nordic countries, where democratic controls over nuclear energy policy are regarded as essential, have been particularly vociferous in their demands for greater consultation over Euratom affairs.