![European Parliament’s scrutiny of the European Council: The use of Parliament resolutions [Policy Podcast]](https://i0.wp.com/epthinktank.eu/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/EPRS_BRIE_757839_EP_resolutions_EUCO_accountability_final.png?fit=1000%2C500&ssl=1)
Written by Ralf Drachenberg with Paweł Bącal.
Resolutions are an essential way for the European Parliament to express its views on political processes, EU policies and developments in the world. Parliament also uses them to scrutinise other EU institutions, including the European Council. The need for accountability and increased scrutiny of the European Council has been a constant theme in the European Parliament’s resolutions throughout the 2019-2024 legislative term. The increased need to scrutinise the European Council also results from the changing role of the institution over recent years.
Based on an analysis of Parliament’s resolutions, this briefing will present the need for democratic oversight of the European Council and outline the different tools at Parliament’s disposal to do so. It provides a unique overview of the content of Parliament’s resolutions addressing the European Council and the messages it sends to EU leaders. Finally, the briefing identifies potential ways of further strengthening Parliament’s scrutiny of the European Council.
The European Council and the need for scrutiny
It is necessary to correct institutional imbalances that have arisen over time and to increase the accountability of the executive toward the legislature, in particular to grant Parliament scrutiny powers over the European Council.
European Parliament, 14 September 2023.
The European Council – a formal EU institution since the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon – consists of the Heads of State or Government of the 27 EU Member States, the President of the European Council and the President of the European Commission. The European Council’s core role is to ‘provide the Union with the necessary impetus for its development and define the general political directions and priorities’ (Article 15(1) of the Treaty on European Union (TEU)). Over the last decade, and notably fuelled by the various crises the EU has had to face, the European Council has expanded its influence over policymaking, which some consider to be ‘legislative trespassing’, and has de facto assumed executive powers. This development has been pointed out by Parliament:
under the pressure of the crisis, the European Council has considerably aggrandised its role, increasing the number of extraordinary meetings and raising to European Council level matters normally dealt with at Council of Ministers level; whereas in this respect the European Council has gone beyond the crucial Treaty injunction that it has no legislative functions.
Parliament has repeatedly criticised the growing institutional imbalance and, during both the ninth and eighth legislative terms, called for the situation to be remedied. In 2019, for example, it stated that the ‘European Council has, against the spirit and the letter of the Treaties, taken a number of important political decisions outside of the Treaty framework, thereby de facto excluding those decisions from the oversight of Parliament and undermining the democratic accountability which is essential with regard to such European policies’.
Accountability is one of the central principles of democracy. This principle also applies to the European Union: Article 10 TEU explicitly provides that ‘the functioning of the Union shall be founded on representative democracy’. Therefore, all the institutions shall be accountable either to the citizens directly, or to their representatives.
As Parliament underlined following the entry into force of the TEU, notably in its December 2013 resolution, members of the European Council, while being accountable individually to their own national parliaments, collectively are accountable only to themselves. Academics have argued that, in the EU’s architecture, the European Parliament is the only institution that might be able to provide a forum for democratic oversight over the European Council as a collective entity.
Parliament has been given a general political oversight function over the executive in the Treaties (Article 14(1) TEU). In an EU framework described by many observers as having a ‘dual executive’ split between the European Commission and the European Council – with respective responsibilities differing according to policy area – the Treaties provide the European Parliament with a number of instruments to hold the European Commission and its President accountable (e.g. censuring the Commission). However, they do not provide Parliament with similar instruments to hold the European Council and its President to account.
This rise in influence of the European Council has not been accompanied by the necessary increase in its accountability. On the contrary, it has even been argued that, in the context of the negotiations on the multiannual financial framework (MFF), ‘the European Council’s dominance distorted the institutional balance laid down in the Treaties … and undermined the transparency and democratic accountability of the decision-making process … the role played by the EUCO is difficult to reconcile with the wording and spirit of the [Lisbon Treaty]’. Therefore, as the role of the European Council has increased, so has the need for the scrutiny.
Read the complete briefing on ‘European Parliament’s scrutiny of the European Council: The use of Parliament resolutions‘ in the Think Tank pages of the European Parliament.
Listen to podcast ‘European Parliament’s scrutiny of the European Council: The use of Parliament resolutions‘ on YouTube.
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