EU Parliament
Li Xin-Li
Student ID :s06129
Paper Supervisor : Dr. Sekou Conde
Minzhu University of China
2006-2007 Academic Year
Abstract
The European Union is a unique, which is different from the United States and the UK. European Parliament is a branch of the governing body of the European Union (EU). It plays an important function in the Union, including the Legislative Process, Budget, Globalization, Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and the Other Responsibilities. Nowadays, The European Parliament faces several challenges.
Key words : EU , Charter , Legislative
The European Union is a transnational organization , which is different from the united stated and the UK. It is the largest union of the world. The European Parliament is also the largest multinational parliament in the world, performs a similar role to any other parliament - to pass good laws and to scrutinize and control the use of executive power. However, the European Parliament cannot be exactly compared with national assemblies or parliaments in Member States, since the EU has no Government for Parliament to form and oversee; the European Parliament can play an important role on many things. This essay mainly talks about the EU parliament’s function and the challenge it faces.
The introduction of EU
The European Union is a unique, which is different from the united stated and the UK. The countries that make up the EU remain independent sovereign nations but they pool their sovereignty in order to gain a strength and world influence none of them could have on their own. Pooling sovereignty means, in practice, that the member states delegate some of their decision-making powers to shared institutions they have created, so that decisions on specific matters of joint interest can be made democratically at European level.
The EU's decision-making process in general and the co-decision procedure in particular involve three main institutions:
??span style="mso-tab-count: 1"> The European Parliament (EP), which represents the EU’s citizens and is directly elected by them;
??span style="mso-tab-count: 1"> The Council of the European Union, which represents the individual member states;
??span style="mso-tab-count: 1"> The European Commission, which seeks to uphold the interests of the Union as a whole.
2 EU parliament
European Parliament, a branch of the governing body of the European Union (EU). It convenes on a monthly basis in Strasbourg, France; most meetings of the separate parliamentary committees are held in Brussels, Belgium, and its Secretariat is located in Luxembourg. Its expansion over the years has followed that of the EU; in 2004, with the admission of ten new nations to the EU, the parliament reached to its current membership of 788.
2.1Organization of the European Parliament
Members of the European Parliament serve five-year terms and have been directly
elected since 1979.[I] The number of MEPs in each member state is based on population size. The most recent EP elections were held in June 2004, and were the first since the EU’s enlargement from 15 to 25 members on May 1, 2004. Voter turnout, however, was the lowest ever at roughly 45%. Average turnout in the ten newest members was only 29%, compared to 49% in the EU’s older 15 members.[II]
1. Political Groups. The new EP has seven political groups, which are based on
ideology rather than nationality or political party, plus some “non-attached” or
independent members. In the June 2004 election, the center-right European People’s
Party and European Democrats (EPP-ED), with 268 seats, retained its position as the
largest political group. The Party of European Socialists (PES) came in second with 202 seats. Euro skeptic candidates made significant gains in some countries, such as the United Kingdom. These candidates formed a new Independence and Democracy group (IND), with 36 seats; in the previous Parliament, the euro skeptic group only had 18 MEPs. The IND is composed of both moderates, who support greater transparency and control over the EU bureaucracy, and radicals, who advocate withdrawal from the EU; both wings of the IND, however, oppose the EU’s new constitutional treaty.[III] As no single group in the EP has an overall majority, however, each must compromise to secure changes to legislation.
2. The EP President. The newly-elected President of the EP is Josep Borrell, a
Spanish MEP in the PES group. Borrell is the first EP president who has not previously served as an MEP. He is a former Spanish government official and one of Spain’s delegates to the convention that drafted the first version of the EU constitutional treaty. he will serve as president for the first half of the new
Parliament’s term, until January 2007, and will then likely be succeeded by EPP-ED
leader Hans-Gert Pottering of Germany for the remaining 30 months. Borrell’s reported priorities will include the looming ratification battle over the EU’s constitutional treaty, and increasing the EU’s transparency and democratic legitimacy — an ongoing problem for the EU, but one further highlighted by the poor voter turnout for the EP election. Borrell opposed the U.S.-led war in Iraq and believes that the EU must develop a stronger common foreign and security policy in order to increase its weight and role in world affairs.[IV]
3. Committees. The new EP has 20 standing committees. These committees are key
actors in the adoption of EU legislation. Each committee appoints a chairman, three vicechairmen, and has a secretariat. The appropriate committee (e.g., the Committee on the Environment, Public Health, and Food Safety would deal with legislation on pollution) appoints a Member as “rapporteur” to draft a report on the Commission proposal under consideration. The rapporteur submits a draft report to the committee for discussion, which is then voted on and possibly amended. The committee’s report is then considered in plenary, amended, and put to a vote. The EP thus adopts its position on the issue. In terms of their importance and strength, EP committees rival those in the U.S. Congress and surpass the role of committees in most national European legislatures.
2.2 The function of EU parliament
The 732-member, directly-elected European Parliament is a key institution of the
European Union. It plays an important function in the worldwide. World leaders flock to address the European Parliament, a truly international forum. Over the years, Parliament has become a focus for presenting the internal and external activities of the Union, meaning that Members of Parliament – and, through them, the citizens – can be involved in marking out their political vision for Europe. The EU is a treaty-based, institutional framework that defines and manages economic and political cooperation among its 25 member states (Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom). Once limited to being a consultative assembly, the EP has accumulated more power over time.
Currently, it plays a role in the EU’s legislative and budgeting processes, and exercises general supervision over the work of the two other main EU bodies, the Council of the European Union (Council of Ministers) and the European Commission. However, the EP is not a legislative body in the traditional sense. The EP cannot initiate legislation; that right rests solely with the Commission, which functions as the EU’s executive and guarantor of the EU treaties. The Council, the EU’s main decision-making body comprised of ministers from the national governments, enacts legislation based on Commission proposals, after it consults with the Parliament.
1. Legislative Process. The role of the European Parliament in the legislative
process has expanded steadily over time as the scope of EU policy has grown. As more decisions within the Council of Ministers have become subject to qualified majority voting rather than unanimity to allow for greater speed and efficiency of decision-making, the Parliament has come to be viewed as an increasingly important democratic counterweight at the European level to the Commission and Council.
The Amsterdam Treaty of 1997, which entered into force in May 1999, extended the “co-decision procedure” to many additional policy areas (ranging from the environment to social policy). In the “co-decision procedure,” the EP and the Council share legislative power and must both approve a Commission proposal for it to become EU law. Reportedly, the EP currently has a say in about 80% of the legislation passed in the EU.[V]Tax matters and foreign policy, however, are among the areas to which the “co-decision procedure” does not apply (the Parliament may give a non-binding opinion). In June 2004, EU leaders concluded a new constitutional treaty that would roughly double the Parliament’s right of “co-decision” to 80 policy areas, including agriculture and home affairs issues, such as asylum and immigration. This EU constitutional treaty must still be ratified by all member states, and is unlikely to enter into force until at least 2006.[VI]
2. Budget. The EP and the Council exercise joint powers in determining the EU’s
annual budget of roughly $138 billion. The budgetary procedure begins with the
Commission proposing a preliminary draft budget to the Council. The Council prepares another draft, which the EP may approve or modify in its first reading. On “compulsory” expenditures — mainly agriculture — the Council currently has the final say, but the EP has the last word on “non-compulsory” [...]
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