After many months of work that involved all the Committees of the European Parliament, the five rapporteurs of the draft report for the amendment of the Treaties (all board members of The Spinelli Group) presented today in the European Parliament’s Institutional Affairs Committee (AFCO) the results of their work and opened a debate in view of the plenary vote scheduled for 9 November.
“This is a great moment for European democracy,” commented Domènec Ruiz Devesa, President of the UEF: “A Europe more able to face the challenges of tomorrow, more democratic and legitimate, more efficient—this is what we need at the moment, and this is what the report is about.”
The report proposes to amend more than 100 articles of the current Treaties and create a new institutional balance between the EU institutions, strengthening the EP and the Commission, and transforming the Council into a federal Senate; granting new competencies to the European Union based on the principle of subsidiarity, and increasing as well the role of the Regions. Furthermore, the proposal would strengthen the role of the European Court of Justice to oversee the respect for the rule of law in the member states.
As Guy Verhofstadt pointed out, the text proposes to overcome the unanimity blockade and to create decision-making mechanisms that would enable the EU to act effectively and more democratically.
The UEF, which campaigned long and hard to bring out, during the Conference on the Future of Europe, these fundamental proposals, supported the drafting of the report by contributing ideas, debates, opinion papers, and citizen engagement activities. We enthusiastically welcome the ideas put forward in the draft report and call for a quick start of the revision process through a Convention.
Sandro Gozi, chair of the Spinelli Group pointed out: “This is not the time to be cautious, because the EU needs this reform now. And since the Council and the governments have never had an appetite for Treaty reform, our task now is to make it happen”.
“We will strive for the Spanish Presidency to send the Parliament’s request on the opening of the Convention already to the last European Council in 2023 so that the Convention can be set already for the beginning of 2025,” added Domènec Ruiz Devesa. He concluded: “We federalists are at the forefront of this battle for the future of European citizens”.
Context
The report presented today follows the resolution of 9 June 2022 where EU lawmakers demanded a strong institutional reform. A reform of the European founding texts is necessary to translate the recommendations of the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) into law.
The CoFoE was a major democratic exercise of the EU, which gathered 400 European citizens to debate better European policies. All the European institutions pledged to take the recommendations of the CoFoE into account, but so far, only the European Parliament has taken definitive action in that regard.