14 May 2010
Stockholm, Sweden
Dear Colleagues,
I would like to start by thanking the organisers of the Conference for their hospitality and particularly for their very businesslike approach to the preparation and timely delivery of the Conference background materials which make our discussions much more constructive.
The Lisbon Treaty has broadened the competences of the national parliaments and granted new powers in policy shaping. However it is for the future to learn how the new mechanism will work and what the practical control of the subsidiarity principle will look like.
Let me share with you Lithuania‘s experience in this field. The Lithuanian Parliament is no exception when it is currently making a revision of its provisions on subsidiarity monitoring.
Even before Lithuania‘s EU membership, the Seimas, the Lithuanian Parliament, enforced a model of parliamentary scrutiny in line with the provisions of the Treaty on a Constitution for Europe. At that time we made use of the best practice of our neighbour parliaments and then creatively developed it further. Since the launching of the subsidiarity control mechanism, specialised committees have been engaged in the exercise. They are made responsible for appropriate and timely control over compliance with the principle of subsidiarity at the initial stage.
It is noteworthy that Lithuania, back then, managed to legislate on parliamentary control over EU matters. Now, with the Lisbon Treaty in place, we must focus on the implementation side and make only a few final touches on our legal framework. Thus the new Treaty has not changed the national coordination system of consideration of EU matters.
The latter basically aims at ensuring parliamentary scrutiny over representation of Lithuania’s interests in the EU institutions. The benchmarking we do rests on the evaluation of cooperation between the government and the parliament in subsidiarity monitoring. The Lithuanian Parliament is currently drafting on preliminary government positions concerning compliance of EU legal acts with the subsidiarity principle to be forwarded to the Parliament together with their social, economic, and financial impact assessment. This will give more solid ground for parliamentary committee rapporteurs to ground their reasoned conclusions on the compliance of a EU legal act with the susidiarity principle.
The legislative process has obviously become a pivotal point in EU inter-parliamentary cooperation, which I consider one the most outstanding results of European integration.
