MEPs back Commission bid for bold IGC

Date: 18/11/1999

By Gareth Harding

THE European Parliament and the Commission do not always see eye to eye, but they appear to be singing from the same hymn-book on the key issue of EU treaty reform.

Last week, on the same day that the Commission adopted its first report on the scale and pace of next year's Intergovernmental Conference (IGC), members of the Parliament's constitutional affairs committee were voting through a text drawn up by German Socialist MEP Jo Leinen and Greek Christian Democrat Giorgios Dimitrakopoulos which reads like a carbon copy of the EU executive's paper.

The full Parliament was due to adopt the report today (18 November), with MEPs unlikely to make any major changes given the huge majority it received at committee stage.

Like the Commission, MEPs favour an ambitious IGC agenda which goes beyond the three issues left over from the Amsterdam Treaty talks - the reweighting of votes in the Council of Ministers, the extension of qualified majority voting and the number of European Commissioners in an enlarged Union.

"We must not think enlargement requires mere reforms; it requires deep-seated reforms," insisted Italian Socialist MEP Giorgio Napolitano, who chairs the Parliament's constitutional affairs committee.

This echoed the view expressed by his compatriot, Commission President Romano Prodi, who described next year's IGC as "our last chance to put our houses in order" when he presented his report on treaty reform to MEPs last week.

Prodi warned that he saw "nothing but risks and dangers in toying with the illusion that major reform can wait until a later conference" and cautioned against permanent revolution in the Union. "Our citizens will, I believe, react with boredom and incomprehension to a Europe which appears to spend all its time on a never-ending, inward-looking institutional review," he told MEPs.

The two bodies' preference for a wide-ranging, one-stop-shop treaty reform puts them on a collision course with EU governments, which favour limited changes. Member states are also likely to balk at some of the reforms mooted by MEPs.

The Parliament and Commission will make concrete proposals on the 'Amsterdam left-overs' in the new year. But both already agree that qualified majority voting should be the rule for voting in the Council, with unanimity reserved for constitutional matters and a limited number of sensitive policy areas. They also favour extending co-decision, the system under which MEPs have equal legislative powers with EU governments, to all areas where majority voting is used.

Other institutional changes favoured by both the Commission and the Strasbourg-based assembly include splitting the treaty into two parts to allow changes to be made in some areas without lengthy ratification procedures, boosting the powers of the Commission president, strengthening the Union's defence capabilities, and reforming other EU bodies such as the European Court of Justice and the Court of Auditors.

However, MEPs would like to go further than the EU executive in a number of areas. British Socialist Richard Corbett accused the Commission of lacking ambition and said Prodi's report was more a "summary of the debate in the institutions over the last few months rather than taking us to another level".

The Parliament believes that MEPs should have the right to veto all international treaties and should be allowed to deliver their verdict on the proposed new treaty at the end of the IGC. The assembly is also expected to call on the Commission to present a draft treaty at the start of the talks and for both the European and national parliaments to be fully involved in the talks.

The constitutional affairs committee narrowly rejected calls for groups of member states to be given further powers to 'go it alone' on certain issues. But with the two major political parties supporting greater use of the so-called 'flexibility mechanism', this amendment was expected to be adopted by the full Parliament at this week's plenary session.

IGC Commissioner Michel Barnier warned that excessive use of the procedure could lead to the "unravelling" of the EU, but said that member states had to find some way to ensure that flexibility was not vetoed by individual countries in an enlarged Union.