Transparency begins at home

Date: 13/06/1996

MEPS will have a golden opportunity next month to show that they are prepared to practise what they preach.

Two sets of proposals to be voted on at the European Parliament's plenary session in July would lay down firm ground rules governing the outside activities of Euro MPs and the behaviour of the lobbyists beating a path to Strasbourg's door in ever-growing numbers.

Judging by the reaction to the vote in the Parliament's rules committee earlier this month in favour of new plans to force MEPs to declare all outside interests, however, the fate of both proposals still hangs in the balance. Already, parliamentarians on both sides of the argument have attacked them for either going too far or not far enough.

The fate of the second set of proposals, designed to establish clear rules for lobbyists operating in the corridors of Strasbourg, hinges on the success or failure of the first. When MEPs failed to agree on the original draft proposals for regulating their own activities back in January, they also delayed a decision on the plan to impose tighter controls on the activities of lobbyists.

Their failure to reach agreement left the Parliament with egg on its face. For while on the one hand MEPs were advocating greater openness from the European Commission and Council of Ministers - and threatening to withhold approval for funding unless they got it - they were, at the same time, rejecting proposals to shed more light on their own activities. It appeared to many that this was a classic case of 'do as I say, not as I do'.

As a result, both reports were sent back to the rules committee for further work, postponing any decision on either plan for more than six months.

The two reports which will be voted on by the Parliament next month are inextricably intertwined: if MEPs are to convince a public increasingly sceptical of all politicians that their outside activities have no influence on the way they cast their votes in plenary, they must also take steps to regularise their contacts with lobbyists seeking to influence the shape of future EU legislation.

No one would minimise the difficulty of drawing up a harmonised set of rules, given that the Parliament's 626 members come from 15 EU countries all with their own political cultures and different approaches to regulating the activities and behaviour of both parliamentarians and lobbyists. But this should not be used as an excuse for yet more delays or deter MEPs from agreeing on an overall framework for action which can be fleshed out later on.

For if they fail to do so, they will give people the impression that they have something to hide. Transparency, after all, begins at home.