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European Council: June 2006

My Lords, there are those of us—I am one of them—who are quite pleased if a Council meeting is a non-event. Not because we do not want anything to happen, but because it is one of the weaknesses of Europe that there always has to be some enormous project—unless there is an enormous project, things go wrong. That is certainly not my view, so I would have no word of criticism on that. There remains an institutional issue, on which I would like to hear an even clearer view from the noble Baroness the Leader of the House. Transparency is not quite the right word, when one talks about how the Council of Ministers of the European Union should operate. With the peculiar language that was introduced at the beginning of the process, in the Treaty of Rome, the Council of Ministers is in part a legislature. Incidentally, the Commission is, in part, a parliament. It has some of the parliamentary rights that the US Congress has—making proposals, even a monopoly, in theory, of making proposals. When you have a legislature, in a democratic context, it is not about transparency, it is an utter necessity that this legislature meets in public and can be checked by the public. Can one be sure that this traditional British position is still upheld, and that nothing occurred at the recent Council meeting which detracts from that understanding of how legislatures should operate?