Committee rejects co-decision claim.
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The European Parliament’s committee on legal affairs has ruled that MEPs should have no say on a proposal by the European Commission to allow direct trade between the Turkish-occupied part of Cyprus and the member states of the European Union.
The decision, taken in an unscheduled vote on Monday (18 October), means that the fate of the proposed direct trade regulation will once again rest with the EU’s member states.
By rejecting any claim to decide the matter by “co-decision” with the Council of Ministers, the Parliament has also backed the Council’s view that member states have to decide by unanimity, effectively giving a veto to Cyprus.
Cyprus and a few other governments oppose the proposal, part of a package that was supposed to end the isolation of the Turkish Cypriot community after it approved a United Nations reunification plan in 2004.
No vote had been scheduled for Monday’s session, but Klaus-Heiner Lehne, the centre-right German MEP who chairs the committee, said that the vote had been postponed three times already and that waiting longer would not have affected the outcome.
Kurt Lechner, a centre-right German MEP who had written a report on the matter, said that using the Parliament’s powers over international trade would undermine the sovereignty of Cyprus, whose internationally recognised Greek part entered the EU in 2004, after the Greek community had rejected the reunification plan. MEPs voted 18 in favour and five against, with one abstention.
But Bernhard Rapkay, a centre-left German who chairs the Parliament’s group for relations with the Turkish Cypriots, said that the vote was “ridiculous”, because the Lisbon treaty provided for co-decision in trade matters. “I want law to be respected,” he said.
He appealed to the committee to give members more time to study the opinion from the Parliament’s legal service on which Lechner’s report was based. Rapkay said that the opinion had been given to members only on Friday.
In its advice, the Parliament’s legal service accepted the argument put forward by the legal service of the Council of Ministers, which found that the regulation did not touch on a matter of international trade but was a matter for the internal market. The Commission’s legal advice, by contrast, found that treating the proposal as a matter of international trade did not imply recognition of the Turkish-occupied north.
Diana Wallis, a liberal British MEP, said: “If we always followed our legal service, we would not be doing our job as politicians.”
The committee’s opinion had been requested by the leaders of the political groups in the Parliament, who did not want to decide on such a sensitive matter without legal advice. The leaders are highly unlikely to dismiss the advice they have now received.
Stephanos Stephanou, a spokesman for the government of Cyprus, welcomed the vote. “The decision is the result of hard and co-ordinated efforts made by the president of the republic, the government and its services, the political parties and the six MEPs of the Republic of Cyprus,” he said.
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