Source EU Observer - BRUSSELS - The setting could not be less spectacular – one of the more
nondescript rooms in the European Parliament's glass towers overlooking Place
Luxembourg in Brussels, where a handful of officials gather with armfuls of
papers. At
intervals, members of the Parliament's catering staff silently walk round the
room offering tea and coffee. Unless you were involved, you wouldn't know that
the meeting – one of around 1,000 so-called 'trialogue' meetings to take place
in 2013 – was actually happening. At
this particular gathering to discuss plans to re-write the EU's accounting
directive in March 2013, MEPs from the Parliament's legal affairs committee –
Klaus Lehne, Arlene McCarthy, Eva Lichtenberger, Alexandra Thein and Saj Karim
– made a breakthrough. They
secured rules that will shine a light on the payments made to governments by
companies working in the controversial extractive industries – rules that
should help prevent corruption and dodgy dealing between companies and
governments. An
Irish government official, whose country has been tasked with leading the talks
(because Ireland held the rotating EU presidency at the time), agreed that,
without exception, all payments over €100,000 must be publicly disclosed. This
will apply to every individual project or contract undertaken by a company. The
new reporting requirements will mark a sea-change in how the industry is
regulated yet the trialogue meeting where it happened remains a closed process. Search
for any mention of trialogues in the EU treaties and you will draw a blank. This
is because despite being an accepted part of the lawmaking landscape, in legal
terms trialogues don't exist. All
trialogue meetings are informal and the timing of the meetings are not known to
most MEPs, let alone the ordinary public. There are no formal minutes taken.
Some are over within a few minutes. Others can go on all day and well into the
night. The
last trialogue on the single resolution mechanism (SRM), the final, and
arguably most controversial piece of banking union legislation, lasted 16 hours
through the night on 19 March as lawmakers sought (successfully) to close a
deal in time for the end of the parliamentary term. Despite
the sense of intrigue that should surround a lawmaking process that few people
are aware is happening, attending the average trialogue meeting would be a
perfect cure for insomniacs, as civil servants and politicians drone through a
bill line by line, article by article. But
they matter. If the EU's bi-monthly leaders' summits are the glamorous (in the
loosest sense of the word) side of the EU, the trialogue meetings are the main
engine driving the sausage factory that churns out EU laws in Brussels.
The triumph of the trialogue - In
terms of numbers, the volume of legislation does not appear to have changed
much in the past two legislatures. MEPs and ministers adopted a total of 447
laws in the 2004-9 parliament. By November 2013, politicians had signed off on
395 files and, even with a wild flurry of activity as they seek to conclude as
much legislation as possible before May's elections, the total number of files
is likely to be around 500. But
what has changed is the way the laws are agreed.
The
formal structure for breaking the impasse between the institutions mentioned in
the treaties is the conciliation committee.
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