Briefing

Shining a light on decision-making

June 1, 2017

In recent years, there have been numerous examples of member states hiding behind Brussels’ procedures such as the opaque comitology procedure. Member states managed to significantly weaken implementing legislation, such as air pollution limits, or refusing to take a decision at all. It was up to the Commission to take a final, often unpopular decision - for which the Commission was then blamed - which led to the infamous Brussels Blame Game. As a response, Commission president Juncker proposed a targeted reform of the Comitology Regulation 182/2011.

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While T&E welcomes any attempt to make member states more accountable and procedures more transparent, we believe the reform is not going far enough.

Concretely we demand that:

the transparency requirements must be significantly scaled up;
the reform must apply to comitology in its entirety;
trade-offs at ministerial level must be avoided;
and the European Parliament be put on equal footing if new responsibilities are created for the Council.

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