A long-delayed plan to create an EU ethics body to police the conduct of officials and politicians could “miss the point” of key reform demands, MEPs have said.
The European parliament, which voted by a large majority in February for the EU to finalise plans for an independent ethics body, is increasingly concerned that the proposals will fall short when the European Commission delivers its blueprint later this month.
Ursula von der Leyen had promised in 2019 to “support the creation of an independent ethics body common to all EU institutions”, when wooing MEPs to support her ultimately successful bid to become commission president, but little happened until the Qatargate cash for influence scandal rocked the European parliament and pushed the issue back up the agenda.
Reformers have long argued for an independent body that could investigate and sanction officials who break EU ethical standards, such as by taking a lucrative private-sector job in an industry they recently regulated.
The commission vice-president Vĕra Jourová, who is expected to set out the plans before the end of May, said last month that the commission had no legal competence to create a organisation that would investigate and sanction. She furthermore suggested that an investigatory body would be impractical, pointing to the fact that the commission investigated 5,000 breaches of its internal rules in 2020.
The body would instead set minimum ethical standards across nine EU institutions, including the commission, parliament, presidency of the EU Council of Ministers and European Central Bank, she said. “All the institutions will have to take into consideration and embed into their internal rules the standards set by the ethics body. So it’s not toothless,” Jourová said.
Daniel Freund, a German Green MEP who was responsible for drafting the parliament’s position on the ethics committee, said Jourová’s proposals “basically have nothing to do with ethics”.
The plans amounted to no more than “a harmonisation committee”, he said, arguing it would not solve anything. “The problem is that the existing rules are not enforced. And if someone breaks those rules, no one ever gets punished. And that is because of the self-policing of the institutions. That’s what we wanted to fix with this ethics body.”
Stéphane Séjourné, the leader of the centrist Renew group, told Jourová the proposals were unacceptable and had to be more ambitious, his spokesperson said. There was discontent in the Renew group about the proposals, the spokesperson added, describing them as “something very light, something consultative” and more like a committee in charge of finding common rules. “But for us the problem is not there,” the spokesperson said. “The problem is the capacity of the European institutions to put into practice controls on problematic cases. We are afraid that the proposals will completely miss the point of the position of the parliament.”
Campaigners and some EU officials have long complained about EU ethical standards. The commission was rebuked in 2018 by the EU’s official watchdog over the way it had cleared a former president, José Manuel Barroso, to take a job at Goldman Sachs. Transparency campaigners are also closely watching the outcome of an ongoing investigation by the EU’s anti-fraud office into the former commission vice-president Neelie Kroes, who stands accused of breaking EU ethics rules after leaked documents suggested she secretly helped Uber to lobby the Dutch government.
Barroso, who led the commission for a decade until 2014, has always denied any breach of the rules. Kroes has also maintained that she followed all EU rules.
Jourová hit back at criticism, while pointing to the limits of a future ethics body. She said it was “nonsense” to suggest there were no ethical standards without the ethics body, an argument she said she had heard in the parliament. “We all have our own ethics,” she said, adding there were some questions that came down to “the moral stance of every individual” and could not be changed by organisations.
Meanwhile, the parliament has faced criticism after revelations that MEPs failed to declare trips paid for by foreign governments and joined unofficial “friendship” groups, seen as a backdoor for authoritarian governments and special interests to lobby the EU.
The parliament’s leadership has also been accused of a tardy response to Qatargate, a scandal that has so far resulted in the arrest of three MEPs, one former MEP, a parliamentary assistant and an NGO director. About a month after the affair broke, the European parliament president, Roberta Metsola, drew up a 14-point plan for reform, including a ban on ex-MEPs lobbying their former colleagues for six months after they leave office.
Freund claimed the parliament had delivered on only one of Metsola’s proposals and had gone for “the weakest version” – a six-month cooling-off period on lobbying by former MEPs, rather than a longer delay.
A spokesperson for the parliament contested this account, saying that five of the 14 points had been agreed, including a requirement for ex-MEPs to register in the EU transparency register if they intend to work as lobbyists after the six-month cooling-off period.
Work on other measures was under way, the spokesperson said, including an obligation on MEPs and staff to report meetings with interest groups, a ban on unofficial friendship groups with non-EU countries, and tighter rules on declaring conflicts of interest. Beyond these 14 points, the parliament was also running awareness-raising campaigns on the rules for MEPs and staffers, the spokesperson added.
