Mercosur roils the European Parliament as services’ refusal of EU Court’s opinion angers MEPs

Brussels -In the EU-Mercosur Free Trade Agreement, the question of legal compatibility with the EU Treaties has sparked a full-blown political battle in the European Parliament. The request to verify the compatibility of the agreement signed at the end of 2024 will not be forwarded to the European Court of Justice, as the European Parliament’s services do not consider that the conditions for such a referral are met. So denounce the members of the informal parliamentary group on Mercosur, who criticise what they call “a political interference within the administration of the European Parliament to facilitate the adoption of a trade agreement.” 

Opening Pandora’s box are MEPs Krzysztof Hetman and Céline Imart (EPP), Chloé Ride and Jean-Marc Germain (S&D), Benoît Cassart and Ciaran Mullooly (Renew), Majdouline Sbai and Saskia Bricmont (Greens), Manon Aubry and Lynn Boylan (The Left). They are the ones who said that the Parliament’s services did not want to ask the Court of Justice to verify the texts of the trade agreement “because the Council had not yet submitted the request for Parliament’s approval.” According to the MEPs, however, in the procedure laid out in Article 218 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU, “no reference is made to the fact that one institution is bound to another to request such an opinion” from the Luxembourg courts. 

Additionally, according to the Mercosur informal group, the request of 145 parliamentarians cannot be overridden by officials. It is true that the possibility for the competent parliamentary committee, or at least one-tenth of the members composing the Parliament, to propose an opinion to the Court of Justice on the compatibility of an international agreement with the Treaties is provided for by Article 117 of Parliament’s Rules of Procedure. However, “in any case, the prerogative of the Parliament conferred by the Treaties cannot be limited by an interpretation of our internal rules, since the latter are lower in the hierarchy of norms,” the MEPs denounce.

There is also the precedent of the EU’s accession to the Istanbul Convention on combating violence against women. On 4 April 2009, the European Parliament adopted a resolution asking for an opinion from the Court of Justice of the EU on the compatibility with the Treaties, before the Council sent the documents relating to the approval procedure. In short, for the MEPs, “there is no legal basis to justify” denying a request to the Court for an opinion. Mercosur, therefore, divides the Parliament and triggers an internal battle within the institution.