,

My comments on Europol case study in the context of parliamentary scrutiny challenge.

First of all, let me comment on what Danielle Auroi has just said. Mme Auroi has not only been very active in bringing European issues to the French Assembly and cooperating through formal channels with EP committees. She also goes beyond this type of cooperation and brings members of her committee for informal debates with committee chairs in the EP. Let me thank all those in national,parliaments who reach out to European Parliament and actively build useful relationship between the two layers of parliaments in EU.

On the Europol issue. This has been a very wise choice of topic for our debate on the cooperation between European and national parliaments in the area of democratic scrutiny. It is a good choice for two reasons. One is obvious. It is an issue of fundamental importance in the context of problems EU has to solve. The second reason is that this is an example of good cooperation and we can learn a lot from this recent experience of joint work, of cooperation between the EP and national parliaments. There will be more issues on the European agenda in the years to come which will require double legitimacy and thanks to this cooperation we know today better how to handle effectively such situations.

On our side, the LIBE committee took very seriously the article 88 of the TFEU which stipulates that Europol scrutinizing activities must be done by the EP together with national parliaments. LIBE invited national parliaments to a joint work on procedure for Europol scrutiny but still a lot of work remains to be done together to operationalize the work of the Joint Scrutiny Group.

Let me finish on a more general note. I sincerely hope that in upcoming Europol annual reports which will be sent to European and national parliaments , we will see a major improvement with regard to the provision of information by individual member states to Europol. Lack of information sharing remains a barrier to effective solutions to the security related problems.

National parliaments can play here a role actively encouraging national governments to boost the information sharing.