Advocacy and Analysis Officer Charles Berkow. Photo: Lisa Bergqvist

We have previously written about how the European Union’s fisheries ministers made decisions at the October Council that disregarded an important safeguard in the EU’s multiannual plan (MAP) for managing the most important Baltic Sea fisheries. In effect, their decisions mean that they are now willing to accept a much higher level of risk for depleted fish stocks than they were when the Council and the Parliament adopted the MAP. This level of risk is also not consistent with the objective of the reformed Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) to restore and maintain fish stocks above much more robust levels (reflected in Article 3(1) in the MAP regulation and Article 2(2) in the CFP regulation, respectively).

Put another way, the medium-term (beyond the next year) economic interests of those making a living from the sea, as well as the marine environment itself, may have been sacrificed for the short-term (the coming year) gain of some segments of the fishing and fishmeal processing sectors.  
 
Those articles were followed up by a later article on a proposal by the Commission and the Council to amend both the Baltic MAP and those covering two other regions by simply deleting the offending article. A more detailed analysis showed that the arguments put forward by the Commission (and the Council) to justify this change are based on a misunderstanding of the science and a misreading of the regulation they want to amend.

Better regulation?

In 2016, in an important step in the “better regulation for better results” agenda of the Juncker Commission, the Commission, Council and Parliament adopted interinstitutional agreements about better law-making. A closer look is taken here at how compatible the Commission action is with the agreement. In its rush to weaken the MAP, the Commission may have violated one or more provisions of this agreement. The Council has accepted this.   

Article 19 provides that the Commission will conduct public consultations before adopting a proposal. In this case, the Commission has opened the consultation at the same time as the proposal was submitted to the Council. This action may be inconsistent with the provisions in Article 19.

Article 13 provides that the Commission will carry out impact assessments of legislative initiatives which are expected to have significant economic, environmental or social impacts. In this case, the Commission has simply claimed that this proposal will have no such impacts. This claim can be questioned. An opportunity for a public consultation before submitting the proposal would have provided more information in this regard. Indeed, a key part of the Commission’s justification for the proposal is that it will have a significant, positive economic impact – which may also be questioned, at least as regards developments after the immediately following year.

Article 8 contains provisions concerning the annual Commission Work Programme, which is to include major legislative proposals for the following year, including repeals, recasts and simplifications. A purpose is to give the Parliament (and others) fair warning of what is in the pipeline. This proposal is not included in Commission Work Programme for 2023 or in the Commission Work Programme adopted in October 2024. On the contrary, the Commission argued in Parliament in January 2023 that the Baltic Multiannual Plan was adequate. In 2020, the Commission did not in its report to the Parliament and Council on the functioning of the MAP identify any problem that would require repealing any articles in the MAP.

Article 10 does mandate that the Commission will give prompt and detailed consideration to requests for proposals for Union acts made by the Council. The Commission proposal does not mention any such formal request, although a Commission statement in the political agreement in connection with the October Council does refer to “Member States’ requests to submit a proposal for a targeted amendment” of the MAPs.  Article 10 further provides that the Commission will reply to such a request within three months, stating the follow-up it intends to give it by adopting a specific communication. As far as we can determine there has been no such communication adopted in this case.

Inconsistent timeline

Cynics might speculate that the Commission has made this proposal simply because the Council has demonstrated that it does not want to abide by the rule which the Commission is now proposing to repeal. Even if this were the case, it does not necessarily justify short-circuiting the normal procedures for better law-making. On the contrary, the fast-track process risks setting a potentially dangerous precedent.

The Council has reportedly now taken the extraordinary step of requesting the Parliament to short-cut its own deliberative process by accepting to treat the Commission and Council proposal under a so-called “urgent procedure” (under Rule 163 in the Parliament’s Rules of Procedure).

There are even suggestions that if this request is accepted, the Parliament could finalize its negotiation position for a trialogue with the Council and the Commission within the coming week.

This timeline is not consistent with the timeline of the ongoing open consultation published by the Commission in early December 2023 and ongoing until the end of January 2024. According to the Commission website, the Commission intends to summarise the feedback received and present it to the European Parliament and the Council with the aim of feeding into the legislative debate.

The extremely short time for scrutiny by the European Parliament might be seen as again cutting corners compared to what would be needed to achieve the ambition of better law-making. The Parliament, of course, does not have to approve any Council request for an urgent procedure.

It may be that in their haste to weaken the multiannual plan for fisheries the Commission and the Council have simply forgotten the rules they agreed to in 2016. The Parliament is in any case put in the awkward position of having to defend, against both the Council and the Commission, not the medium- and longer term interests of those making a living from the sea and the marine environment, but also the integrity of the better law-making agreement.

Text: Charles Berkow