Keywords
Summary

Keywords

1 Actions for annulment - European Parliament's right of action - Conditions - Defence of parliamentary prerogatives - Participation in the legislative process - Action founding on the inadequacy of the statement of the reasons on which the contested measure was based - Inadmissible

(EC Treaty, Arts 173 (now, after amendment, Art. 230 EC) and 190 (now Art. 253 EC))

2 International agreements - Agreements entered into by the Community - Conclusion of such agreements - Agreements for which the European Parliament's assent is required - Agreements with important budgetary implications - Meaning - Criteria

(EC Treaty, Art. 228(3), second subpara., (now, after amendment, Art. 300(3), second subpara., EC))

Summary

1 The European Parliament may bring an action before the Court for annulment of an act of the Council or the Commission provided that it does so in order to protect its prerogatives. That condition is satisfied where the Parliament indicates in an appropriate manner the substance of the prerogative to be safeguarded and how that prerogative is allegedly infringed.

By virtue of those criteria, an action founding on infringement of Article 190 of the Treaty (now Article 253 EC) is inadmissible where the Parliament, in alleging that the contested provisions are inadequately or incorrectly reasoned for the purposes of that article, fails to provide any relevant indication as to how that infringement, assuming that it has been committed, is such as to impair Parliamentary prerogatives. That is the position where the Parliament confines itself to arguing that the Council's amendment of the legal basis proposed by the Commission has affected the Parliament's powers, and fails to indicate how the mere fact that the contested regulation does not contain any specific reasoning in that respect could impair the Parliament's prerogatives.

2 In order to assess whether an agreement between the Community and a non-member country has important budgetary implications within the meaning of the second subparagraph of Article 228(3) of the Treaty (now, after amendment, Article 300(3), second subparagraph, EC) and whether, accordingly, its conclusion requires the assent of the European Parliament, a comparison of the annual financial cost of the agreement with the overall Community budget scarcely appears significant, since appropriations allocated to external operations of the Community traditionally account for a marginal fraction of the Community budget.

However, comparison of the expenditure under an agreement with the amount of the appropriations designed to finance the Community's external operations offers a more appropriate means of assessing the financial importance which the agreement actually has for the Community. Where a sectoral agreement is involved, that analysis may be complemented by a comparison between the expenditure entailed by the agreement and the whole of the budgetary appropriations for the sector in question, taking the internal and external aspects together. However, since the sectors vary substantially in terms of their budgetary importance, that examination cannot result in the financial implications of an agreement being found to be important where they do not represent a significant share of the appropriations designed to finance the Community's external operations.