The External Side of Parliamentary Democracy. Comment on the Case C-658/11 European Parliament v Council of the European Union

Abstract

The need to determine the scope of EU policies is not a new challenge in the case law of the Court. The extent of the powers of the European Union institutions – beyond its constitutional significance – also has considerable practical importance, taking into account several factors such as decision making procedures to be applied, actors involved in the procedure, the binding force of the legal actions in question as well as the scope of judicial review. Delimitation of EU policies raises further delicate questions in the field of external actions where sensitive – commercial, defense and security policy – interests of national governments are at stake, not to mention the particular interests of the other actors of EU governance.The action of the Parliament calls on the Court, in the context of the fight against piracy off the coast of Somalia, to clarify the boundary between three fields of the European Union’s external action, namely the common foreign and security policy (CFSP), the external dimension of the area of freedom, security and justice (AFSJ) and development cooperation. The case examined in this paper provided the first opportunity for the Court of Justice to interpret the scope of the European Parliament’s prerogatives, granted by the Treaty of Lisbon, in the procedure of the conclusion of CFSP international agreements between the EU and a Third State.