It has not been a good few months for the European Parliament, and today probably tops all of the days for stories that show the EP in a bad light.
As Jason O’Mahony points out, the EP lost the Toland Case in the ECJ yet still refuses to publish the report in question. Diana Wallis MEP on Twitter explains the next steps:
@jonworth ECJ judgement in Toland case relating to 2006 discharge audit report will be discussed by EP bureau at next meeting on 22nd June
— Diana Wallis (@dianapwallis) June 8, 2011
The irony of this (not lost on Bruno), on the day that the EP proposed a 5% increase in the EU’s budget for the financial perspectives 2014 onwards. The report in question has, before the case, been leaked.
Elsewhere in EP business, the welcome vote by the EP to express it’s opposition to the Strasbourg seat of the Parliament was overshadowed by Martin Schulz, future President of the Parliament (unless anyone musters up the guts to oppose him), who declined to vote on the issue. Excellent analysis of this from Michiel van Hulten.
All of this follows the fallout from the Cash for Laws scandal with one of the MEPs involved – Adrian Severin – still a MEP. Silvana Koch-Mehrin is also, for now, still a MEP despite scandals, and that issue will come to a head this month.
So here’s a small suggestion… Get as many bloggers as possible to focus on the issues of trust, transparency and openness of the European Parliament on 22nd June, the day the bureau of the EP is to meet to discuss this. With a few dozen blog entries across multiple blogs, and a bunch of tweets, we should manage to focus some press attention on these issues for that day. Who’s in?
