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Democracy sidelined: Commission pushes through Mercosur agreement without Parliament

ESN Group Press Office · 1 min read
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The European Commission has announced that it intends to provisionally apply the trade and free trade agreement with the Mercosur bloc, even though it has not yet been ratified by the European Parliament and is currently under legal review by the European Court of Justice. On this, Markus Buchheit, MEP for the ESN Group and member of the Committee on International Trade, stated:

“What the European Commission is doing here is an unprecedented abuse of power. To put an agreement into provisional effect even though it has neither been ratified by the European Parliament nor finally reviewed from a legal standpoint amounts to nothing less than a deliberate circumvention of democratic oversight. While the European Court of Justice is still examining the matter, the Commission is creating a fait accompli and bypassing Parliament. This approach strips the agreement of any democratic legitimacy and creates massive legal uncertainty. Anyone who acts in this way is placing themselves above the law and undermining the institutional balance of the European Union.”