PURPOSE: to present a report from the Commission on the activities of comitology committees in 2003.
CONTENT: this report covers the activities of comitology committees during the year 2003 and follows the basic structure of the previous report covering the year 2002.
It contains an introductory Section 1, which looks at the legal nature and role of the committees in question, the state of implementation of Decision 1999/468/EC, the European Parliament's right of scrutiny, referrals to the Council and wider developments (e.g. Convention on the Future of Europe and enlargement).
This is followed by a horizontal overview of committees' activities in Section 2 that looks at the number of committees and types of procedures, the number of meetings and the number of opinions and instruments.
Lastly, there is an Annex with detailed statistics regarding the individual comitology committees, organized according to the different departments of the Commission (presented as a Commission staff paper).
This report maintains the improved transparency of the statistics in the Annex by listing all committees individually together with textual comments on their activities.