EU Institutions
The European Parliament represents, in the words of the 1957 Treaty of Rome, ‘the peoples of the States brought together in the European Community’. With the recent enlargement of the EU to Bulgaria and Romania, some 490 million European citizens in 27 countries are now involved in the process of European integration through their 785 representatives in the European Parliament.
The Parliament has three main roles:
It shares with the Council the power to legislate. The fact that it is a directly-elected body helps guarantee the democratic legitimacy of European law.
It exercises democratic supervision over all EU institutions, and in particular the Commission. It has the power to approve or reject the nomination of Commissioners, and it has the right to censure the Commission as a whole.
It shares with the Council authority over the EU budget and can therefore influence EU spending. At the end of the procedure, it adopts or rejects the budget in its entirety.
Parliamentary Committees
In order to do the preparatory work for Parliament’s plenary sittings, the Members are divided up among a number of specialised standing committees.
There are 20 parliamentary committees. A committee consists of between 25 and 78 MEPs, and has a chair, a bureau and a secretariat. The political make-up of the committees reflects that of the plenary assembly. The parliamentary committees meet once or twice a month in Brussels. Their debates are held in public. The committeesdraw up, amend and adopt legislative proposals and own-initiative reports. They consider Commission and Council proposals and, where necessary, draw up reports to be presented to the plenary assembly. Parliament can also set up sub-committees and temporary committees to deal with specific issues, and committees of inquiry under its supervisory remit. The committee chairs coordinate the work of the committees in the Conference of Committee Chairmen.
List of Parliamentary Committees