The legal acts developed within the European Union are mainly influenced by three institutions:

This week Amelia and the rest of MEPs are in Strasbourg for the plenary sessions. If you follow it even just a little, you might have heard several times the expressions ‘Amendment’ and ‘Compromise Amendment’. If you have wondered what they are, here you have the answer.

The application of EU law can be made through two different instruments:

An ‘interest group’, most commonly known as ‘lobby’, is any organization or individual who develops activities with the aim of influencing the policy and decision-making processes in an institution. Among these activities it is included contacting MEPs and/or officials of the EU institutions; circulate communicating letters, information materials or position papers; organising events, meetings or promotional activities, etc.

Report: A parliamentary report is a document that formulates Parliament’s position about a specific topic. It contains amendments suggested by the committee who created it, and also explanations for them.

Rapporteur: Is the MEP who is in charge of preparing a report.

A delegation is created with the aim of maintaining relations and exchange information with parliaments in non-EU countries. Meetings between both parliaments are held once or twice a year, alternately in the EU and in the non-EU country that is in the delegation.

There are four types of delegation:

The aim of the committees of the European Parliament is to help the European Commission in initiating legislation. They are formed by MEPs from every political group in the Parliament and each Committee has a chairperson and four Vice-Chairpersons.

Memberships in a Committee can be of two kinds:

With this post, we start a series of articles about EU vocabulary. With this we aim to help to better understand the language used by the EU institutions, especially the European Parliament. Please, feel free to give us ideas and ask about a specific topic or expression!

As today is the first time, I will go for something easy: What a political group is.