Aligning a number of legal acts with the TFEU (Article 290, Commission delegated powers)

The European Parliament adopted by 480 votes to 48 with 15 abstentions, a legislative resolution on the proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council adapting to Article 290 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union a number of legal acts providing for the use of the regulatory procedure with scrutiny (RPS).

To recall, the Commission committed itself to assessing by the end of 2012 how many legislative acts containing references to the regulatory procedure with scrutiny remained in force, in order to prepare the appropriate legislative initiatives and thus complete the adaptation to the new legal framework. The stated objective was that, by the end of the seventh term of Parliament, all provisions referring to the regulatory procedure with scrutiny would have been removed from all legislative instruments.

The Commission put forward three proposals fulfilling this commitment (Please see 2013/0220(COD) and 2013/0365(COD)).

This resolution is related to a proposal covering 160 legislative acts in various policy areas.

The position adopted by Parliament in first reading following the ordinary legislative procedure amended the proposal.

Parliament’s amendments proposed that the power to adopt delegated acts should be conferred on the Commission for a period of five years from the date of entry into force of the regulation (and not for an indeterminate period). The delegation of power shall be tacitly extended for periods of an identical duration, unless the European Parliament or the Council opposes such extension not later than three months before the end of each period.

Owing to the highly technical and complex nature of the delegated acts in certain policy areas, Parliament proposed that the time limit for objections to the act should be three months, extendable by a further three months at the initiative of the European Parliament or of the Council.