Cygan, Adam --- "‘Collective’ Subsidiarity Monitoring by National Parliaments after Lisbon: The Operation of the Early Warning Mechanism" [2012] ELECD 513; in Trybus, Martin; Rubini, Luca (eds), "The Treaty of Lisbon and the Future of European Law and Policy" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: The Treaty of Lisbon and the Future of European Law and Policy

Editor(s): Trybus, Martin; Rubini, Luca

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9780857932556

Section: Chapter 3

Section Title: ‘Collective’ Subsidiarity Monitoring by National Parliaments after Lisbon: The Operation of the Early Warning Mechanism

Author(s): Cygan, Adam

Number of pages: 19

Extract:

3. `Collective' subsidiarity monitoring
by national parliaments after Lisbon:
the operation of the early warning
mechanism
Adam Cygan

1. INTRODUCTION

The Treaty of Lisbon has included a number of substantive amendments
designed to improve the participation of national parliaments in EU
decision-making, the most important of which is the allocation of the task
of subsidiarity monitoring. This development is intended to address con-
cerns within national parliaments that they have hitherto been peripheral to
EU decision-making and that EU legislation often lacks legitimacy
amongst its citizens. Though national parliaments have been recognised
within previous Treaties this recognition was limited to guaranteeing a
minimum period within which they could individually review the Council's
draft common position within the ordinary legislative procedure. This
domestic scrutiny was aimed at the national minister with the primary
objective of influencing the minister prior to the final vote in Council which
agreed the Council's formal common position towards a legislative pro-
posal.
One weakness of these scrutiny arrangements was that because the
activities of each national parliament were individual there was scope for
inconsistency. Scrutiny activities varied across the Member States which
lead to national parliaments being characterised as either `strong' or `weak'
actors in respect to their EU oversight activities.1 Working Group IV of the

1
See, further, Goetz, K. and H. Meyer-Sahling (2008), `The Europeanisation of
National Political Systems: Parliaments and Executives, Living Reviews in European
Governance, 3 (2), available at http://www.livingreviews.org/lreg-2008­2 ( ...