The European and national parliaments in the area of freedom, security and justice: does interparliamentary cooperation lead to joint oversight?

ABSTRACT

To what extent does the cooperation of national parliaments and the European Parliament strengthen the oversight of EU executive actors in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice? The article provides an ideal-typical conceptualisation of individual and joint parliamentary oversight in the EU’s multi-level system. Legislative scrutiny is examined for the case of the General Data Protection Regulation and agency oversight is analysed for the case of Europol. In both cases, the article demonstrates that the interparliamentary cooperation has not led to a joint oversight. Legislative scrutiny was badly timed, characterised by diverging interests, and a high fluctuation of the participating parliamentarians. The Joint Parliamentary Scrutiny Group over Europol has turned out to become a primarily symbolic layer to the ‘individual oversight’ exercised by the European Parliament’s LIBE committee.

KEYWORDS:

• Area of freedom security and justice
• European Parliament
• Europol
• interparliamentary cooperation
• GDPR
• parliamentary oversight

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Ben Crum, Katharina Meissner, Ian Cooper and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on an earlier version of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Information retrieved from IPEX and double checked with the European Commission’s Political dialogue website.

2 The Romanian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, French, Italian, German, Austrian, Croatian, Belgium, UK, Greek. Portuguese, Dutch, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish parliaments.

3 Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Spain, France, Croatia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by VUB Strategic Research Programme: Evaluating Democratic Governance in Europe (EDGE): [grant number SRP43].

Notes on contributors

Angela Tacea

Angela Tacea is a research fellow at the Institute for European Studies of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). She is also an associated researcher at the Center for Europeans studies and comparative politics (CEE), Sciences Po Paris. Her research and teaching interests are broadly in European decision-making process and constitutional law, with special focus on institutional actors and procedures, fundamental rights and justice and home affairs policies, e-government, civic techs and artificial intelligence. Her work has appeared in prominent journals such as West European Politics, the Journal of Common Market Studies, and Politics and Governance.

Florian Trauner

Florian Trauner holds a Jean Monnet Chair at the Brussels School of Governance of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). He also co-directs the Brussels Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Migration and Minorities (BIRMM), a VUB Centre of Expertise gathering 110 researchers from 11 disciplines. His research concerns the European integration process with a focus on EU asylum, migration, border control, counter-terrorism policies and linkages between EU internal security issues and foreign policy. He regularly teaches at the College of Europe and held permanent or visiting positions at the University of Vienna, the University of Renmin in China, Science Po Paris, and the EU Institute for Security Studies.