Council Transparency and VoteWatch

BY CC DrabikPany.

Last week I was at the (re)launch of the VoteWatch website, which now covers Council votes as well as European Parliament votes. The Council votes on display are put together using information already publically available, though it’s currently not machine readable so the information needs to be collected manually.

A lot of the comment so far has focused on the rates of voting no in the Council (and that the UK and Germany seem to vote no the most, while France and Lithuania always voted with the majority). There are some debates over what this means (including that it’s more indicative of being able to play the political game beforehand if you can agree to the text when it comes to the vote), but I agree with Ronny that the rates of voting no are very small. In fact, only in 35% of cases where there is qualified majority voting and not unanimity, were there any dissenting votes (90% of votes are run on the QMV procedure - you can read the VoteWatch report here). So while I might be surprised that Ireland is in agreement with Italy a lot of the time, and in 100% agreement with Germany in the area of the environment, it’s only to a slight degree, since (near) unanimous agreement is the rule rather than the exception.

The panel discussion covered some interesting questions, such as the transparency of the political negotiations in the lead up to the vote and the transparency of amendments. It turns out that there are several shadow or practice votes in the Council groups working on the legislation, which generally see closer results than the final vote, and that amendments are proposed in many ways – formally submitted in writing, submitted in an informal style, and introduced orally, which may make it difficult to record in the same way the European Parliament records its amendments. (It was also noted that amendments are whittled down in number and merged in negotiation before being put to the vote. However, the Council is nowhere near this level of transparency yet). It could also be argued that with an array of groups working on legislation and several shadow votes, it would be difficult to keep track of everything and to judge its influence. After all, it seems to be a question of how negotiations should be led, and if these shadow votes are aids to negotiation, perhaps they should continue to be held in secret, especially since their significance individually is hard to measure.

A lot of the debate centred on whether the greater transparency of the Council votes via VoteWatch – and it is a great blow for transparency of the EU that the painstaking work of bringing these votes together in a readable way will be carried out finally – will affect how the Council operates. Will it withdraw more into the background? Will Member States change their voting habits (more likely to vote against in some cases, less likely to vote against where popular measures, such as lower roaming charges, are at stake?)?

The tension at the heart of the Council when it comes to transparency is diplomacy versus democracy. While it’s true that negotiations and diplomacy are a part of parliamentary life, when it comes to the Council it’s of a different class altogether. The justification against transparency is that there are key negotiations at stake and that the Member States should be free to pursue them. There should be some space for confidential negotiations, like in any legislative body, but there’s the rub: the Council is operating as a legislative body. Where the Council acts like an upper house of a parliament, we should expect those levels of transparency and clarity of procedure.

There won’t be a groundswell of public concern for this, and we should focus on pushing the boundaries of transparency under the current structure, but where the structure of the Council presents arguments that something should be kept secret for negotiation’s sake, we should be willing to ask: why should it be structured this way? Does it need to be secret at so many stages? Aren’t you legislating for us?

Northern Ireland continues to Fail to implement EU law

A few months ago the big news in Northern Ireland was that a failure to properly administer CAP funds (e.g. built on land and some land not belonging to the farmers in question was claimed for) led to the Commission itself investigating the procedures of the Department of Agriculture and Regional Development, leading to a €60 million+ penalty being imposed. Now it seems that the BBC have uncovered the long-term failure of the NI Executive to implement EU legislation on protecting horse mussels. It seems that the original complaints were made 6 years ago.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, the BBC obtained 24 months worth of documents, which show how anxious the civil service was that the lack of progress in protecting the horse mussels would be uncovered, yet nothing was done.

"Even as late as June last year, six years after the initial complaint was made, one civil servant warned: "If the Commission asks what progress has been made... the departments will be exposed"."

It wasn't as if the Agriculture and Environment Ministries - and Ministers - didn't know that something had to be done about this: in January 2009 the ministers jointly proposed action, and that exclusion zones would be set up to protect the mussels:

"In January 2009, the Environment Minister at the time, Sammy Wilson and Agriculture Minister Gildernew called a press conference at which they claimed they were riding to the aid of the horse mussels.

By then a restoration project was had begun although there were still no non-disturbance zones and today, they still don't exist.

In the last batch of emails and minutes of meetings the BBC has seen little has moved on.

The two departments are still arguing over what size the non-disturbance zones should be and where they should be, they can't even agree over whether lobster and crab fishing is damaging the mussel beds."

While it can be argued that there have been difficulties in restoring devolved government to Northern Ireland that would have delayed descisions being taken, it's hard to believe that since the St. Andrews argeement in 2007 that these decisions couldn't have been taken.

It's interesting to see how this story is being picked up. The communal blog Slugger O'Toole picked up on the story earlier this weekend, and asked whether the NI government was dysfunctional or just incompetent. The BBC focused on the issues and explained how long the situation was going on for, and what had been going on within the civil service. The main thrust is about how local government is spending - or misspending - European money and living up to its commitments under European law.

In comparison, last week BBC Newsnight covered a story on English local councils being fined for non-compliance with EU obligations, but focused on the fact that some councils would have to pay for not flying the European flag, despite being in receipt of EU money. There was then a discussion on whether the European flag should be flown more in the UK (or England, since the pointed out that Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland doesn't seem to have a problem with it). Since councils were being fined money for non-compliance, I would have thought that it would be useful to focus on what areas caused the most trouble, and what problems stopped the councils from successfully carrying out legal obligations.

However, setting that aside, since the flag discussion isn't a bad idea in and of itself, looking at how the discussion was lead, it didn't seem as if the BBC knew exactly why the councils had to fly the flag. It wasn't mentioned whether it was by law or under contract that the flag had to be flown (in fact, the Belgian Ambassador on the programme said it was just contractual, rather than by a general law, as was implied). That it was contractual wasn't challenged by the presenter, but she continued to asked whether council should be forced to fly the flag by law. It seems that the lack of clarity was meant to drag out the discussion (perhaps another sign of the silly season), since I doubt that there would be much disagreement that if it's in the contract, it should be followed. While a debate on the value of European symbols could be a good one (unfortunately this debate didn't live up to that billing), I would have preferred to have seen a exposé on how European money is being (mis)spent by councils and what role the councils are playing. Surely such an angle would be more in keeping with the idealised role of the 4th estate?