Tuesday, June 25, 2013
D1.18A (Oudemanhuispoort)
The European Parliament remains modestly empowered in international relations with information and veto rights, enhanced only by Inter-Institutional Agreements. The Parliament has a history of expanding the constitutional boundaries of its own powers through litigation in the EU courts. The Parliament’s pursuit of fundamental rights issues has resulted in it being depicted as the citizens’ advocate. International relations pose many problems for development through litigation, given its executive-dominant contours. One specific field of EU international relations to assess the role of the Parliament is that of EU-US relations. In non-legal accounts of EU-US relations, the Parliament is portrayed as having reached the height of its empowerment, no longer able to improve the substantive content of EU-US Agreements. However, the Parliament secured the annulment of the EU-US PNR Agreement in 2006 through judicial review and has acted thereafter as political guardian of citizens’ rights. There is ongoing Parliament-initiated litigation striving to enhance the transparency of EU-US relations.
The paper considers the capacity of the Parliament to ameliorate institutional and constitutional shortcomings of EU-US relations through judicial review. The paper assesses how litigation initiated by individual parliamentarians reflects on the institution itself, its committees and its powers.
