Posted on 04/04/2014 5:52:35 PM PDT by Olog-hai
The setting could not be less spectacular—one of the more nondescript rooms in the European Parliament’s glass towers overlooking Place Luxembourg in Brussels, where a handful of officials gather with armfuls of papers. At intervals, members of the Parliament’s catering staff silently walk round the room offering tea and coffee. Unless you were involved, you wouldn’t know that the meeting—one of around 1,000 so-called “trialogue” meetings to take place in 2013—was actually happening. […]
Around 80 percent of EU laws are now agreed at first reading, with research by the parliament estimating that the average law agreed at first reading takes 14.4 months from start to finish. The trialogue process, which starts as soon as the institutions agree an initial position on a law, is designed to speed the process up. […]
Others complain that democracy and transparency are the losers. The two points at which MEPs vote for laws, in committee before and at the end of the trialogue process, and the final vote among all 751 deputies, are both in public, but this only camouflages the fact that most of the negotiations are held behind closed doors with no public access.
For their part, national parliaments complain that the process makes it even tougher for them to influence the process. Back in 2009, a report by the UK parliament’s EU committee noted that the use of informal trialogues “makes it harder for national parliaments to conduct effective scrutiny of EU legislation”. …
(Excerpt) Read more at euobserver.com ...
The European Union, perfecting tyranny since 1993!
US Congress’s voting on thousands of pages of Obamacare legislation without any Congresspeople bothering to read or understand it is just the same thing. We become more like the Communists everyday. Just like in China, the People’s Congress dutifully votes for whatever the Party Politburo and its bureaucracy place before it. As Mme Pelosi said, you have to pass the bill to see what’s in it...
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