The sluggish turnaround of the European Commission in answering parliamentary questions is now subject to an official complaint to the European Ombudsman after an investigation by a Dutch MEP revealed 95% of questions were not answered in time.
Dutch populist MEP Rob Roos made the complaint after compiling a list of 23,000 parliamentary questions submitted to the Commission since 2019. The parliamentarian also called out the increasingly poor quality of responses given by EU officials.
Under parliamentary rules, MEPs are allowed to make an unspecified number of written or oral inquiries to the Commission through the office of the President of the Parliament. Officials are normally required to give an answer within six weeks.
According to Roos, this process is rapidly breaking down. He noted that one priority question—relating to the Commission President’s relationship with the Pfizer CEO—took seven months to get a reply, instead of the three-week response time that is mandated for “priority questions.”
Roos added that “the quality of responses by the Commission is noticeably substandard,” and said the tardy attitude to parliamentary concerns is a cause for concern for MEPs.
The EU Ombudsman’s office—the ethics body designed to provide oversight on the running of EU institutions—will make an assessment of the complaint before consulting with the Commission and making its findings public.
This is not the first time the parliamentary questions system has been in the public eye. The method of asking questions has been lambasted as a lobbying tool, with MEPs accused of accepting payment to lodge tailored questions.
The European Commission did not respond at the time of publication to media inquiries about Roos’s complaint or the state of the parliamentary questions system.
