[News] European Parliament Committee’s Opinion on an EU Code of Administrative Procedure
Thomas Perroud brought to our
attention an interesting Opinion of the Committee on Petitions of the European
Parliament on the project of an EU Administrative Procedure Law.
In this Opinion (available here)
the Committee first points out that ‘soft-law' administrative procedures, which
can be modified unilaterally by the institution concerned, are not always sufficient
to protect the individual's right to good administration. It therefore calls on
the Commission to envisage a regulation providing for minimum standards of quality
and procedural guarantees that would be horizontally applicable to all Union administration.
The Committee further notes that the general principles of the future
European administrative regulation should include the principle of equality and
the principles of impartiality and independence, while guaranteeing fairness,
lawfulness and legal certainty and the principles of proportionality and
openness; it also encourages the introduction of the service principle, whereby
the administration should avoid unnecessarily cumbersome and lengthy procedures.
Moreover, the Committee on Petitions
stresses the urgent need to introduce more extensive administrative rules for
the procedure on public access to European Parliament, Council and Commission
documents, with particular regard to codifying the relevant case law of the
Court of Justice and extending the scope of the current Regulation to the whole
of the EU's administration. With respect to conflicts of interests, it notes
that the existing Staff Regulations need to be supplemented by rules governing
the consequences, such as the possible revocation of decisions taken in
violation of the rules on conflicts of interests.