As a member of the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee, part of my job is to ensure the members of the next European Commission are fit to serve.
The trouble is, my committee is probably not properly equipped to carry out this task. Not only do we lack the tools to do a proper job; as politicians, we risk not being seen as impartial, undermining the point of the exercise: to ensure that the Commission is seen by voters as legitimate.
The task we’ve been given is an important one. As a newly elected member of Parliament, I’m impressed by the effort to turn the vetting of the new Commission into a real democratic process. Our role makes every commissioner accountable to the people, and ensures each nominee is vetted for potential conflicts of interest.
We fulfilled this part of our mandate late last month, when we excluded two candidates — Romania’s Rovana Plumb and Hungary’s László Trócsányi — for their worrying conflicts of interest. These decisions, made by a clear majority, were well justified and necessary if the next Commission is to be held to the highest standards of ethics and transparency.
And yet, as soon as these decisions were made, it was clear they would be interpreted another way. Sure enough, taking a tough stance opened us up to claims of political bias.
Anyone who exercises a high executive or legislative function should be held to the same standard as commissioners.
It’s inevitable that critics and skeptics will try to cast doubt on the process. And the process with which we vet the Commission’s candidates makes us vulnerable to these type of criticisms.
Members of the Legal Affairs Committee are expected to check that candidates’ declarations of financial interest — a document designed by the European Commission — are accurate. But we haven’t been equipped with the relevant tools to do so. Crucially, we have no investigative powers.
The risk, then, is that our checks are insufficient — or, more dangerously, that they turn into fights between various political groups.
Adding to that uncertainty is the fact that some MEPs, even as they’re supposed to be probing conflicts of interest, fall short of the standards we’re trying to enforce on Commission candidates. Some MEPs, as shown by recent documents released by NGOs, have earnings from work outside of Parliament. This has the potential to be a problem.
Outsourcing the vetting process to an outside body would not be an admission of weakness.
The result: Voters are left with the impression that we are not operating on the basis of solid, unbiased facts.
We urgently need to correct this situation. Lawmakers in the Parliament should concentrate on what they were elected to do: set stringent transparency criteria, define the standards for probes and set up sanctions for those who don’t comply.
But we should leave the actual probe of who falls foul of these standards to an independent body with investigative powers.
This independent authority — which could be modeled on France’s Haute Autorité pour la Transparence de la Vie Publique, for example — would be tasked with collecting the facts. Only then would MEPs consider the suitability of the candidates.
The body would check that Commission candidates do not have financial interests that would undermine the European collective interest. It should also evaluate commissioners’ wealth before, during and after their mandates, in order to determine if any fraud could have taken place.
The mechanism should also be extended to scrutinize members of the European Parliament, as well as secretaries-general and directors-general of the other EU agencies and institutions. Anyone who exercises a high executive or legislative function should be held to the same standard as commissioners.
In addition to ensuring that decisions are made based on impartial facts, the scrutinizing body would also be in charge of imposing sanctions, and thereby ensure these too are impartial and not politically motivated.
Outsourcing the vetting process to an outside body would not be an admission of weakness. Safeguarding the EU’s ethics and standards should not be left to politicians. We will never be perceived to be neutral enough.
Stéphane Séjourné is president of the French delegation of the Renew Europe group in the European Parliament and a member of the Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs.