By SchumanSquare

Filed under : SchumanSquare >> SchumanSquare >> Europe and its citizens >> MEP attendance records soon to be made public

Key words :

MEP attendance records soon to be made public

20 Nov, 2008 07:03 pm

“Each time [...] an MEP attends a committee or plenary meeting, he or she signs a list of attendance and automatically receives €287 per day. From a certain degree of absenteeism, the MEP is supposed to repay part of this sum. Therefore a clear list of presences would [...] prevent them slipping through the net”, Célia Sampol writes in this Europolitics article.

Europolitics website

The European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee voted by near unanimity, on 17 November in Strasbourg, to clearly and automatically publish MEP attendance lists. It seems as though the MEPs had not taken the time for a detailed reading of the proposals of rapporteur Marco Cappato (ALDE, Italy) on the annual report on access to documents. Because the text, adopted by 40 votes for, none against and only one abstention, goes relatively far in transparency. Cappato asks that before the European elections in June 2009 an “extraordinary action plan” is put in place, with the goal of divulging as much information as possible on MEPs’ activities. This would include their presence at parliamentary work, in terms both absolute and relative, their participation in roll call votes, and the meetings of institutional bodies that they attend. These data would be accessible to citizens through the Parliament’s internet site (searchable by the MEP’s name, plenary, committee, delegation, vote, day or term). Currently, it is difficult to have access to all this information. It all is public but they must be sought in the unending minutes of various meetings and, to find the absence rate, one must manually count the number of times that the name of an MEP appears. This task may take several hours and ultimately they do not constitute official data. The rapporteur wants everything to be made automatic through the use of Excel tables- and published.

For Cappato, this would be a major step forward because these presences are paid by the taxpayers. Each time that an MEP attends a committee or plenary meeting, he or she signs a list of attendance and automatically receives €287 per day. From a certain degree of absenteeism, the MEP is supposed to repay part of this sum. Therefore, a clear list of presences would allow light to be cast on which MEPs must refund money and prevent them slipping through the net. It remains to be seen if the plenary will accept going as far during its vote in mid-December in Strasbourg.

Internal bodies

Cappato’s report also asks that the EP’s internal bodies, such as the Bureau and the conference of group presidents, authorise access to their documents, which is not currently the case. Finally, he insists on greater transparency in the Council and reiterates that the Council should publish all of its debates, documents and information, including the identity of members of member state delegations, and its working groups and expert groups. This is only an own-initiative report, but some of its elements could be taken up in the legislative report by Michael Cashman (PES, UK) on the revision of Regulation 1049/2001 on access to the institutions’ documents.

Copyright © 2008 Europolitics. All rights reserved.