European Parliament demands new EU watchdog for governance, rights

Members of European Parliament (MEPs), meeting for a plenary session in Strasbourg, adopted a resolution on Tuesday calling for a new binding mechanism for the oversight of democracy, rule of law, and fundamental rights (DRF) in European Union (EU) members.

The resolution, passed with 405 votes in favor, 171 against and 39 abstentions, calls for the European Commission to create a new DRF watchdog that would replace the "crisis-driven" functioning of recent years with an annual monitoring and reporting system based on objective benchmarks and gradual approaches to remedying problems.

During the Tuesday morning debate that preceded the adoption of the resolution, rapporteur Sophia in't Veld (the Netherlands / Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe group) described the need for the new watchdog.

She said, "when a country wants to join the European Union, it has to meet the highest standards, but member states of the European union cannot be held to those standards, we don't really have sufficient means to enforce our standards."

In their resolution, MEPs have proposed for the incorporation of existing DRF tools into a single mechanism to ensure they are used in full, and to bridge the perceived gap in effective mechanisms between EU candidates and EU members.

The European Commission will now have until September 2017 to present a proposal for a Union Pact for Democracy, the Rule of Law and Fundamental Rights, taking the form of an inter-institutional agreement aligning and complementing existing mechanisms. Enditem