Speaker wants less tight EU-rules for ‘yellow card’.

5 October 2013

The Speaker of the House, ms. Anouchka van Miltenburg, takes initiatives to come to less tight schedules for the ‘yellow card procedure’ within the European Union. 

The Speaker of the House, ms. Anouchka van Miltenburg, takes initiatives to come to less tight schedules for the ‘yellow card procedure’ within the European Union.

Extremely tight
Until now national parliaments only have 8 weeks for the scrutinizing procedures against proposals from the European Commission. “This time schedule is extremely tight. Especially if we would like to use inter-parliamentary co-operation in order to strengthen our argumentation and eventually reach agreement among the 10 parliaments that are needed for a yellow card. And even more so if a parliamentary recess falls within this 8-week period,” ms. Van Miltenburg said in a speech for the members of the European Association of former parliamentarians in The Hague on September 4.

International contacts
Ms. Van Miltenburg will try in the coming months to improve these rules of procedure. In inter-parliamentary meetings such as COSAC and the Speakers conference, she hopes to reach an agreement with other national parliaments on a more generous timeframe  than 8 weeks to scrutinize subsidiarity, on including aspects of proportionality as well as subsidiarity, and on setting quality standards for the answer of the European Commission  to letter from national parliaments.More often than not the answer of the European Commission is only received more than 6 months after a letter was sent out by the House of Representatives.

You can read the complete speech in the attached pdf-document