By Bruno Waterfield - 25th July 2006
The council of the EU – the Brussels institution representing national governments – is to ask for extra time to reply to questions from MEPs.
Civil servants working for the EU presidency and national representations are set to plead pressure of work in response to European parliament complaints.
A draft reply to parliament president Josep Borrell’s complaint over missed deadlines and delays to written questions will ask for an extension to time limits.
“The time between the date on which a MEP tables a written question and the date on which this question is transmitted to the general secretariat… in all languages is usually two weeks.”
“In practice, it makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to comply with the time limits of three weeks (for the priority questions) or six weeks (for the other questions) expected by the MEPs.”
“We believe that these time limits can no longer be met,” states a draft text to be agreed by EU ambassadors.
Europe’s diplomats are also struggling with a growing postbag from an enlarged EU assembly now representing 25 rather 15 members and soon to grow to 27.
“Members tabled 330 questions in the first six months of this year compared with 265 written questions in the first half of 2005,” states a draft response.
“Taken together with the rising number of questions as a whole, parliamentary questions create for the council and for the 25 national delegations an increasing workload to manage.”
Another issue for EU diplomats are questions outside the scope of the council’s mandate or power.
“Let me also take this opportunity to draw your attention to the fact that a number of these written questions relate to topics that are clearly not within the council's competences.”
“Reducing the number of questions which fall outside the council's competence would free up resources to help ensure questions can be replied to more promptly,” says the reply.
“If it would be helpful, the council services and the presidency would be ready to informally discuss with colleagues from the parliament services to explore whether there are practical possibilities to overcome these problems.”
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