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The European Parliament, besides the legislative function of codecision, has, as far as the legislative field is concerned, two other important functions: it can act as a consultative body, as it did at the beginning. Actually, there are some fields where the European Parliament has no power to enter the decision-making process, but the right/duty to express its opinions and give its indications. They are especially the fields concerning the heart of national sovereignty and for which the States give the Council the possibility to decide; we are speaking, on the one hand, of foreign policy and defence field, and on the other hand, of internal security. These are two fields where, in fact, it is necessary for the Parliament to express an opinion, but nothing more than that (except for the judicial cooperation, in particular as far as concerns the immigration visa and the asylum policy). In these cases the European Parliament can have the possibility to go on with the codecision procedure. But there is another legislative function performed by the Parliament and this is the assent procedure. What does the assent procedure is? In practice it is ratification. In fact, we use the assent procedure when the European Parliament must approve, for instance, an accession treaty, or an association treaty, or even ratify the procedure relative to the treaty modifications. In all these cases the European Parliament does not issue any amendments to the proposals that it has received from the Council and from the other community institutions, but it expresses an assent, that means, as a national Parliament does, it says whether it agrees or not on a certain proposal. As I have already said, the assent procedure is especially used for the accession treaties. In fact, the Parliament has recently expressed its assent for the accession of Bulgaria and Romania to the European Union. These are the functions that the Parliament performs within the legislative field, but there are also some functions that the Parliament performs as far as concerns the supervision of the institutions, in particular the democratic supervision of the Commission. There must be a fiduciary relationship between the Commission, which is the executive body of the European Union, and the Parliament. Actually, the Parliament has a big power with respect to the Commission, since it has a powerful tool of intervention: the motion of censure. This means the Parliament can disagree with the European Commission’s stance and can, in a certain moment, deny its confidence to the Commission. At this point the Commission must resign. But obviously, before doing this, there are some debates, there will always be moments to make a decision at this regard, but it is very important that, when the President of the Commission is appointed, he must have the confidence of the European Parliament. Moreover, the Commission he chairs must be voted by the majority of the European Parliament. If this is not the case, we have a difficult situation, as we have seen in the last European Commission and of which I’ll talk in the next episode, in order to describe the actual situation that had been created when there was not a perfect match between the Commission on the one hand and the Parliament on the other.
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