The European Parliament’s committee on constitutional affairs (AFCO) rejected on Wednesday a draft plan to implement an EU body for ethical standards, agreed by European institutions after the allegations of corruption involving Qatar and Morocco that hit the Parliament from December 2022.
In spring 2024, eight of the institutions and advisory bodies of the EU signed an agreement to establish the so-called “Interinstitutional Body for Ethical Standards for Members of Institutions and Advisory Bodies of the EU”.
The European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the EU, along with five other institutions, agreed to form a board composed by their representatives and five independent experts, in charge of developing and updating common minimum standards for ethical conduct and for general procedures to ensure and monitor compliance.
EU institutions now need to implement the agreement by establishing internal rules in order to make it work, but the first attempt to do so has failed in the European Parliament.
The report drafted by the AFCO committee included provisions governing appointment of independent experts or Parliament’s representative to the ethic body – each institution should appoint a senior member – and safeguards to address possible conflicts of interest within the body itself.
The committee was split on the vote: Socialists and democrats, Renew Europe, Greens/EFA and The Left were in favour, adding up 13 votes. All the right-wing parties (European Conservatives and Reformists, Patriots for Europe and Europe of Sovereign Nations) voted against, as did the European People’s Party (EPP), whose choice was definitive in reaching the 17 no votes which rejected the text.
The EPP team-up with the right wing groups follows a pattern quite common in the votes of the Parliament’s new legislature, the so-called “Venezuela majority”, named after a vote supporting recognition of Edmundo González as Venezuelan president in October 2024.
Ethics body in danger
Parliamentary sources told Euronews that rejection of this specific draft is not tantamount to the institution withdrawing from the agreement on an ethics body.
The Greens/EFA group said it intended to ask the legal service for an opinion on the matter, and a plenary debate on the topic could be one of the options. The Greens, together with socialists and liberals could also push for a different way to elect the independent experts without reforming the Parliament’s rules.
“The progressive side of the European Parliament remains committed to this mandate of integrity, transparency, and accountability, despite this unacceptable backtracking by the EPP to align itself with far-right groups and therefore break any commitment to the accountability of the ethics body,” socialist MEP Juan Fernando López Aguilar told Euronews.
But developing the ethics body now seems imperilled, as the largest group in the European Parliament is strongly against a new body that affects the internal functioning of the Parliament.
“The extrajudicial ‘Ethics Body’ would violate the presumption of innocence and publicly stigmatise politicians,” said in MEP Loránt Vincze, EPP group spokesman in the Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs Committe, in a press release which described the body as “the wrong answer to a valid question”.
Opposition from the EPP has been painted as “backtracking” by its political opponents, as the interinstitutional agreement was signed, back in 2024, by Parliament President Roberta Metsola, who herself belongs to the centre-right family.
“We have established an interinstitutional agreement […] to ensure an ethics body with the participation of independent experts to respond to the credibility crisis that followed a scandal that occurred in the last legislature, the so-called Qatargate. In this legislature, the EPP is withdrawing its support,” said López Aguilar.
The groups supporting the ethics body are now asking for a meeting with Metsola to discuss the next move. “She signed the agreement, and now it’s her who has to find a way,” said López Aguilar.
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