Amelia Andersdotter - EU Vocabulary

The main actors of the decision making process in the EU

Felipe Gonzalez Santos — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 17:17:39 +0000

Språk Engelska

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

1.- The European Commission is the one who normally initiates the legislative process by producing a draft for a new law and proposing it to the other two main actors: The European Parliament and the Council of the European Union. The Commission is lead by 27 Commissioners, one per member state, that change every term. Its President is currently Mr José Manuel Durão Barroso.

2.- The European Parliament is composed by 754 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) democratically elected every five years. Together with the Council of the European Union, is the institution in charge of 'law making', which means receiving the drafts proposed by the Commission and modify them to obtain as outcome a final law to be implemented in the 27 member states. To attain this objective, MEPs work in Committees, where they can focus on the topics they are more interested or specialised. At the present, the President of the European Parliament is Mr Martin Schulz.

3.- The Council of the European Union is conformed by the ministers of each member state and is the other 'law making' institution of the European Union. Its presidency switches from one member state to another every six months. During the first semester of 2013 the country who holds it is Ireland.

Amendments and Compromise Amendments

Felipe Gonzalez Santos — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 16:08:58 +0000

Språk Engelska

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.

An Amendment is a change in a concrete legislation proposed by a MEP or a political group.
A Compromise Amendment is a change in a legislation agreed by two or several MEPs that had proposed amendments to the same paragraph of the legislation.

Regulations & Directives

Felipe Gonzalez Santos — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 16:59:25 +0000

Språk Engelska

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

Regulations: They are the fastest form of EU law, in the moment they are approved they become immediately enforceable in every member state. Regulations self-executing, this means that national governments do not need to take any action to implement them. In this way, European institutions can be sure that legislation is uniformly applied everywhere in the Union.
Directives: They are legislative acts of the EU that establish a particular result to be achieved by member states and a deadline to do so. The difference with the regulation is that in this case countries are free to decide how to attain this. With this kind of laws, the peculiarity of every country is taken into account.

Interest Groups in the EU

Felipe Gonzalez Santos — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 14:47:25 +0000

Språk Engelska

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.

Even if when one usually thinks about a lobbyist we mostly have in mind somebody representing the interests of a private company, there are many other kinds of interest groups such as:

Professional consultancies
Law firms
Self-employed consultants
Companies & groups
Trade, business & professional associations
Trade unions
Non-governmental organisations, platforms and networks
Think tanks and research institutions
Academic institutions
Organisations representing churches and religious communities
Organisations representing local, regional and municipal authorities, other public or mixed entities

The European Parliament and the European Commission offers a Transparency Register, where all interest groups are expected to submit some information about them such as number of employees and number of workers destined to policy advocating, budget designed to lobbying activities, information about the company…

Reports, Rapporteurs, Shadows and Shadow Meetings

Felipe Gonzalez Santos — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 14:07:54 +0000

Språk Engelska

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.

Shadow rapporteur (usually called just ‘shadow’): Is the MEP appointed by the political groups other than that of the rapporteur to follow a report and negotiate its amendments.

Shadow meeting: It is a meeting between the rapporteur and the shadow rapporteurs to develop the report they have been appointed for.

Delegations of the European Parliament

Felipe Gonzalez Santos — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 11:01:36 +0000

Språk Engelska

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:

Joint parliamentary committees: They are created with the parliaments of States that have association agreements with the EU or of States that have initiated accession negotiations with the EU.
Parliamentary Cooperation Committee: They are created with the objective of achieving a cooperation agreement between the European Union and a non-EU country. They mainly collaborate with the States involved in the European Neighborhood Policy and countries which have signed strategic partnership agreements with the EU. The number of members varies from one delegation to another, but the EU and the third-country always have an equal amount.
Other interparliamentary delegation: They promote relations with countries outside of the European Union which are not candidate countries. These delegations develop their activities in cooperation with the AFET, DEVE and INTA committees.
Delegations to multilateral parliamentary assemblies: These delegations maintain and foster relations between the European Parliament and the assemblies of other multilateral institutions.

Here you can find the complete list of delegations, classified by region, country and type.

Committees of the European Parliament

Felipe Gonzalez Santos — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 08:11:34 +0000

Språk Engelska

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:

Full Member: It has full speaking and voting rights
Substitute Member: It has full speaking rights but can only vote in replacement of absent full members.

For every report of the Committee, the chairperson appoints a rapporteur who will be in charge. This person is selected from amongst the Members and permanent substitutes of the Committee. Normally, political groups other than the one of the rapporteur appoint a person in charge for that specific report. This person is called ‘shadow rapporteur’ or just ‘shadow’.

Right now, In the European Parliament there are 20 Committees, 2 sub-committees and 1 special committee:

Foreign Affairs (AFET)

Amelia is a Full Member of ITRE, the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy; she is also a Substitute Member in INTA (Committee on International Trade) and CONT (Committee on Budgetary Control).

Christian, her colleague MEP from the Pirate Party, is a Full Member in IMCO, Committee on the International Market and Consumer Protection, and in JURI, the Committee on Legal Affairs.

Political Groups in the European Parliament

Felipe Gonzalez Santos — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 13:58:34 +0000

Språk Svenska

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.

Even though Members of the European Parliament are elected in their home countries and are part of lists of national parties, when they arrive to Brussels they are not organised by nationalities. MEPs form ‘Political Groups’ according to their political affiliation. Political groups might be formal representations of a European political party or coalitions of a number of parties and independent politicians. There are several requirements to form a political group; the most important ones are having at least 25 Members, representing one-quarter of the Member States.

Members that are not part of any political group are known as non-attached Members.

Currently seven Political Groups are present in the European Parliament:

Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats)

Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament

Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe

European Conservatives and Reformists Group

Confederal Group of the European United Left – Nordic Green Left

Europe of Freedom and Democracy Group

Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance, where the Pirate Party is.