The anticipated EU ethics body will have appropriate enforcement mechanisms, Věra Jourová, EU Commission vice president for values and transparency, promised at a press conference in Brussels on Thursday, June 8th. Jourová revealed proposed details of the ethics body that is meant to oversee corruption and conflicts of interest within the EU institutions in the wake of the still-raging Qatargate scandal.
Despite what the Commission says, however, the proposal looks pretty much like the paper tiger everybody expected it to be. The ethics body will have no authority to investigate or punish EU officials on its own and the MEPs will be able to retain their diplomatic immunity. Instead, the anti-corruption authority will only develop and oversee the implementation of new standards, but their enforcement will remain an exclusively institutional competence.
Plans to create a separate anti-corruption authority to oversee ethical conduct in all EU institutions based on common guidelines were first presented by the Commission back in 2019, although the initiative did not take off easily. Initially, seven out of the nine institutions flat-out refused to sign off on the plan, including the European Parliament.
But after years of negotiating—and going through the recent traumas of the Qatargate scandal—the inter-institutional ethics body is now finally established, albeit in a heavily watered-down version, and on track to have its first meeting with the EU’s highest representatives on July 3rd.
As we reported last month, the draft proposal surfaced from behind closed doors, and much to the dismay of the leftist MEPs, it suggested the new body won’t have much more than advisory authority, prompting many on the left to label it “toothless.”
“We will not negotiate something that is so far from the position of our Parliament,” MEP Stéphane Séjourné of the liberal Renew party said recently. “How come the Commission can propose something so empty?” he added.
But during Thursday’s press conference, the Commission VP tried her best to calm the nerves and assure all concerned parties that the anti-corruption authority will be more than capable of doing its job.
“The ethics body will set standards for the implementation” of its new transparency rules, “including its compliance and follow-up,” Jourová told reporters. “This means that the body will not be toothless, as there will be mechanisms to ensure that rules are efficiently applied. It will monitor their enforcement and it will publicly report how each institution is dealing with it.”
According to the commissioner, the ethics body will have three main tasks: developing high common standards, exchanging practices among the institutions, and promoting and guarding the EU’s “ethics culture,” whatever that means.
Furthermore, the commissioner detailed specific areas that the body will focus on when devising the rules, including the EU officials’ post-mandate and side activities, declarations of junkets (gifts, travel, accommodation), transparency in dealing with stakeholders, and even addressing harassment within the Brussels bubble.
However, even if the standards—if accepted— will be legally binding, they will still have to be agreed to by each institution separately, before being adapted to their own internal framework of rules. After being pressed by journalists, Jourová admitted that enforcement of these standards will also remain the sole competence of each institution, as well as sanctioning those who are found in breach of them.
Now, the relative weakness of the ethics body is mainly good news for the right wing of the European Parliament. Despite the fact that it was mostly leftist MEPs to take the spotlight of Qatargate, it was the conservative parties—EPP, ECR, and ID—who were opposing the establishment of a body with relevant powers and authority.
Some of them simply didn’t like the idea of another agency poking through the parliament’s internal affairs and taking over its existing competences, while others were concerned about the potential abuse of power this could open the door to, fearing ideologically motivated witch hunts within the ranks of the MEPs.
Still, there will be options, albeit limited, to punish a Eurocrat if their institution wouldn’t, Jourová insisted. If an institution is found to be lagging in sanctioning an individual, she said, “there is a possibility to ask the European Court of Justice to decide, because, again, these will be legally binding obligations.”
The reason the ethics body won’t have its own powers to investigate and sanction, the commissioner explained, is because it’s not a legal instrument that was established under the treaties, but merely an interinstitutional agreement. And “to use sometimes very intrusive methods, let’s face it, you need to be authorized by the law,” she said, but adding that she cannot exclude that there won’t be plans in the future to strengthen the body’s legal basis.
Regarding the question of MEPs’ diplomatic immunity from the investigations conducted by OLAF, the EU’s primary anti-fraud agency, Jourová said the new regulations will keep the existing system in place, although she thinks the agency should be allowed to investigate the finances of parliamentarians at some point. “There should be better clarifications on where the immunity of an MEP starts and ends,” the commissioner said but added that this was the Parliament’s to decide.
With regards to the timeline, July 3rd will mark the first meeting of the ethics body with the highest-ranking representatives of all nine institutions, but the ethical standards will take months to devise and negotiate, after which around half a year is expected to be given for each institution for the implementation process. Any meaningful result, therefore, can only be expected next year.
