Friday, July 10, 2015
J211 (13 rue de l'Université)
The Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) touches upon two fundamental issues: on the one hand the national sovereignty and the State’s capacity to control and to manage its territory and its population, and on the other hand the protection of fundamental human rights and civil liberties. Thus, the balance between liberty and securityis the core of the AFSJ. Because until the Treaty of Lisbon, most of the policies in this area were adopted as primary legislation, with no parliamentary debate, the third pillar’s decision-making procedures were considered to lack of democracy and to have led to an insufficient standard of human protection. However, recent developments in this area bought by the Treaty of Lisbon granted to national parliaments the capacities to bring a more human rights oriented approach to security driven policies.
Engaging with both the literature on national parliaments and the European integration and that on the European justice and home affairs policies, this paper aims at explaining the activity of national parliaments in the AFSJ and at testing whether, in line with scholars’ expectations, the involvement of national parliaments in European policies brings a higher protection of fundamental human rights to the AFSJ.
To do so, the paper relies on two theoretical concepts: that of parliamentary scrutiny and that of frame and two case studies: the reform of the Schengen agreement proposed by the European Commission in September 2011[1]and the Passenger Name Records Agreements (PNR) with the United States.
