Lawmakers Called Wary of Power Transfer to Independent Agency
Convincing the European Parliament (EP) to vest telecom regulatory authority in a “federal,” pan-European body may be difficult, a spokesman for German MEP Angelika Niebler, who chairs the EP’s industry, research & energy committee, said last week. Legislators have resisted such power transfers in other cases, the European Regulators Group (ERG) told Information Society & Media Comr. Viviane Reding in Feb. The proposal isn’t yet officially on the table, but MEPs are wary of a super-regulator, the spokesman said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
Reding -- concerned that Europe’s internal market suffers from lack of regulatory coordination and remedial consistency across the 27 EU states -- is eyeing several options to resolve the situation. These include giving the EC “veto” power over national regulators’ competitive remedies and remaking the ERG as a pan-European body in the form of an EU agency that makes regulatory decisions, with EC oversight. Regulators need the extra power now, they said, adding that in the long rum they wouldn’t mind having it to deal with cross-border and pan-EU markets. (CD Feb 28 p10) But any power transfer must be lawful, they said.
Previous EC efforts to shift power to an independent body have been thwarted, the ERG said, citing the Meroni case. That 1958 lawsuit stopped the High Authority of the European Coal & Steel Community from giving a private body broad discretionary powers. The decision bars delegation of policymaking authority to an independent agency, according to an American Bar Assn. paper on the foundations of European govt. and law.
Some see Meroni as banning transfer of any EC powers to outside bodies, a source said. But times have changed. The European Coal & Steel Community Treaty expired in 2002, and there’s now the EU and a European Community Treaty, in which the EP and Council of Ministers are co-legislators. New agencies exist, among them the Trade Mark Office and the European Aviation Safety Authority.
The ERG’s Meroni citation is politically helpful for the EC, the source said. In the end it means “we need Europe,” but that can only come by boosting the Commission’s internal market powers. The focus is the internal market, not more power for the EC, the source said.
There are 2 views in the EC, the source said. Some commissioners want to keep power with the EC. Others are open to exploring other avenues if it helps the internal market and provides a system as effective as Commission oversight. The jury’s out until July, when Reding unveils her proposals to modify the e-communications regulatory framework, the source said.
A super-regulator can’t guarantee telecom markets will work better, Niebler’s spokesman said. And lawmakers are reluctant to hand power to a single EU body, he said; such agencies take on lives of their own.
A better approach than a centralized agency is national regulators that are fully independent and collaborate closely, the spokesman said. And even if they can’t work together, that doesn’t signal a need for a super-regulator, he said.
The EP apparently hasn’t always felt that way. In Feb. remarks to the ERG, Reding noted the possibility of a single EU regulatory body, calling the idea “not entirely new.” In 1997, the EP “expressed its preference” for the idea by agreeing to an interconnection directive requiring the EC to study the added value of setting up a European regulatory authority to handle tasks better undertaken at the EU level.
Any EC plan for a centralized agency must be approved by govts. in the Council of Ministers. Council bodies will “deal with this issues only when the Commission’s legislative proposal is on the table,” a spokeswoman said.