The Dutch Parliament adopted a motion to prevent the coming A-buse of the Councils procedure rules next week. They say that the Council should at least wait for the Commission decision on Parliament's request to restart the legislation.
This time around, the Dutch minister in charge actually promised to follow that motion. Her weird theory that the Dutch position doesn't matter since there won't be a vote anyway seems to have been retired. Of course that assumes that she has not been lying to the Dutch Parliament when making that promise. We will see soon enough if that assumption is correct.
This clearly shows that the Members States' positions do matter in any stage of the procedure. Again, A-items means voting without discussion, not voting without voting. With 25 Member States, taking a vote requires about 50 seconds, counting 2 seconds per Member State.
Most A-items really don't require further discussion, since the political agreement actually exists. With those, it clearly makes sense to skip a formal vote and save those 50 seconds in the process.
In contrast, in this case, the "political agreement" does not really exist. It is pure fiction. Once you call a vote, multiple Member States needed for a majority would vote against.
Therefore, in this case the whole point of avoiding the vote is not the legitimate reason of saving time, but the deeply disturbing wish to fabricate a majority where there is none.
If there is a "confirmation without vote" under this theory some time later, that means that Member States' representatives won't get a chance to state their position at that particular Council meeting.
In that case, it would seem to make sense to ask them elsewhere.
For example, in the German Parliament's session scheduled for the same day (February 17th) of the Council meeting the A-buse is supposed to happen, someone might ask the German government:
"I hear that you don't get a chance to vote on the Directive in today's Council meeting. Just for the record: Is the German Government for or against this proposal?"
That would open interesting possibilities to contrast the answer to that question with what will be recorded in the minutes of the Council meeting in question later.
Of course, somebody might ask other Governments who pretend they don't get a chance to state their position in Council elsewhere as well.
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Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at February 11, 2005 12:38 PM