European Parliament asked to examine lobbying practices
               
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A set of recommendations on how the European Parliament should govern lobbying practices has been submitted to Questors, in the hope that a more effective and transparent system of rules can be put in place.
The report, authored by Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), concludes that the Parliament needs to formulate a uniform set of rules for both official groups and inter-party, or cross-party, groups, and that it should have a tight set of transparency obligations.
“There is a wide debate on lobbying practices in the EU at the moment, particularly about transparency”, explains Olivier Hoedeman, Research Co-ordinator at CEO. “But most of the debate has focused on the Commission. We want to focus more and more on Parliament”.
The main focus of the CEO report is on Parliamentary intergroups. These are made up of MEPs from different political groups. Presently, there are 25 officially recognised intergroups, but a number of unofficial groups also continue to operate in Parliament. These are not subject to the same set of standards as the official groups, introduced in 1999.
“There has been attempts before to set rules for these groups”, continues Hoedeman”, but these turned out to be a messy compromise”.
Since the mid 90s, Parliamentary intergroups have “mushroomed”, and have become embroiled in the “standard system of lobbying”. But, says Hoedeman, very little information about these lobbying activities is available.
“Once, there was a fear that these intergroups would compete with the official groups. Now, with their growth, MEPs should be concerned about this”.
“Twenty-five recognised groups have transparency obligations, and these are used to influence Parliamentarians. We have no problem with this, but it should be done in a transparent way”.
“When lobbying pays for the Secretariat’s expenses and such, this creates another set of problems. There is a growing number of groups that are determining the political agenda. They are investing in influencing Parliament”.

Photo: courtesy of www.edmunds.com

Written by Cillian Donnelly
Monday Oct 23, 2006

http://www.eureporter.co.uk/showarticle.php?newsid=2442