Nicola Lupo

Towards an Asymmetric European Union, Without an Asymmetric European Parliament

In the last few years, the European integration process has increasingly resorted to flexible mechanisms of co-operation and decision-making, involving only a limited number of European Union (EU) Member States. The economic and financial crisis itself - and above all the response of the EU to the crisis - has undoubtedly favoured the trend.These ongoing asymmetric mechanisms deeply challenge the supranational architecture upon which the EU experience is based, determining a major change in the formal role and powers of both the European and national institutions. In particular, the European Parliament is incapable of adapting its internal functioning to the asymmetric schemes. In order to contrast these trends, some hypotheses of reform have been formulated, aiming either at building a new institution, a sort of Euro-Parliament; or at adapting the internal organisation of the EP to ongoing asymmetric tendencies limiting the voting rights of MEPs.The essay challenges both these hypothesis, assuming that responding to the increasing asymmetries of the EU by making the existing institutions, above all the European Parliament, more asymmetric, would consistently endanger the cohesion of the Union and threaten the good functioning of its governing bodies. Rather, the approach should be based upon a re-consideration of the overall representative circuit upon which the EU is founded. This implies that an even more asymmetric EU will have to rely on its traditional channels of parliamentary representation: what will need to change is not related to the nature or the format of parliamentary representation, but rather to its operative patterns, which should count on strengthened cooperation among parliaments to accommodate asymmetric tendencies in the EU governance with flexible forms of interaction in the scrutiny of such procedures.

Transparency vs. Informality in Legislative Committees: Comparing the US House of Representatives, the Italian Chamber of Deputies and the European Parliament

Although committees are deemed to be – in this century, as in the previous one – the ‘legislative backbone’ of legislatures, scholars have not devoted enough attention to how parliamentary committees cope with the challenge of the ‘forced increased transparency’ of their legislative activity, depending on the opportunity to use old and new media as channels of institutional communication with citizens. On the one hand, increased transparency could be an added value of their work. On the other hand, there is the risk that the wider disclosure of legislative committees’ activity could undermine their ability to act as ‘consensus-building’ arenas, and thus affect their legislative capacity. The article argues that increasing levels of transparency can impair committees’ lawmaking performance, so also undermining the lawmaking ability of their legislatures. In three very different legislatures (the US House of Representatives, the Italian Chamber of Deputies and the European Parliament), both in institutional architecture and committees’ legislative powers, the growing transparency of their legislative activity has caused a shifting of the legislative decision-making away from committees or, even, outside the legislature.

The conference on stability, economic coordination and governance: filling the gaps of parliamentary oversight in the EU

Abstract In the EU institutional architecture, parliamentary oversight of economic and fiscal policies is weakened by the existence of spheres of activity that tend to escape from the two ordinary channels of parliamentary representation. The consideration of existing gaps in the oversight circuit leads to investigate on the actual as well as the potential role of the Interparliamentary Conference on Stability, Economic Coordination and Governance (SECG). A representation of the actual pros and cons of this Conference is drawn by means of the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis. On this basis, strategies suited to turn this Conference into a body instrumental to strengthened and effective parliamentary oversight are highlighted, considering interparliamentary cooperation not as an autonomous channel for representation, but as an instrumental dimension that could help the European Parliament and national parliaments to tighten their oversight capacity, in their respective domains.

Status prawny ugrupowań parlamentarnych i ich rola w strukturze Izby Deputowanych i Senatu

The contribution examines the evolution of the regulation of parliamentary groups in the Italian Chamber and Senate. The analysis moves from the very first provisions regulating this matter, that were introduced in 1920 under the Albertine Statute. Then, the contribution explores the reactivation of the regulation of parliamentary groups at the dawn of the Italian Republican experience, investigating its subsequent transformations, till today. Some concluding remarks are devoted to perspectives and recent reform proposals, especially those deriving from the constitutional amendment on symmetric bicameralism approved in 2016 (currently subject to a referendum). This reform aims at introducing a new Senate, that would represent territorial autonomies and exercise, among others, a “connecting function”, thus requiring an appropriate balance of the political cleavage with the territorial and institutional ones.

The Relocation of the Legality Principle by the European Courts' Case Law: An Italian Perspective

The essay tackles the broader trend in the European legal area of moving from the formalistic concepts of law and legislation to substantive ones, by illustrating its reflection in the Italian legal system, as an example of a country of the civil law tradition in contemporary continental Europe. This trend, fostered by the case law of the European Court of Human Rights and somehow implied in the current status of the legal integration within the European Union, has been taken over by the highest Italian Courts. The results of this evolution are a progressive decline of the formal categories that dominated the public law literature in the past two centuries but, at the same time, carry the risk of also losing the democratic meaning of the legality principle, represented by the necessary linkage between the system of sources of law and the separation of powers. In other words, relocating the role of parliamentary legislation means rethinking the role of parliaments vis-a-vis both the government and the courts in the contemporary state. The essay fosters the reflection on this process and on some of its potential disadvantages for the good functioning of European continental democracies