The EU Legislative process has many steps, some of which occur a long time before any proposal of legislation emerges on the public scene, and some of which happen in parallel to the “official” steps taken by each legislative instrument.

In order to ensure that you adopt the most effective strategy, it is therefore critical to:

• Understand and master the EU legislative process, and

• Get a grip on the Agendas of the various institutions involved

The key message is obvious: the earlier you get in, the more likely you are to make a difference (but also the more time you need to spend preserving whatever you obtained from the endless creativity of the different players in the process, and the unexpected results of horse trading and compromise deals).

Knowing at what stage you are in a process is key to assess what can be realistically achieved and who needs to be made aware of your issue and its possible solution.

EU Legislative Process

Idea

The earlier one starts lobbying a legislative measure, the more chance one has to influence it significantly.

Draft

In the process from Idea to Draft, a document undergoes multiple steps.

Proposal: the different procedures

Though Co-decision is the main procedures, legislative proposal can be adopted under various types of procedure.

EU Law

In this section, we examine the “Comitology” procedures, as well as the role of Agencies in shaping European law.

National law

When EU legislation is not directly applicable at national levels (for example in the case of a Directive), each Member State must implement that legislation before the specified deadline and in a correct manner.

Agendas

A general overview is available on the Commission’s Europa site here. It is quite well done, as it allows to have an overview per institution as well as stretched over a week, a month or a quarter.

Council Agenda

Council agendas are usually posted quite late, are not very helpful in terms of clarity, and removed nearly as quickly as they are posted.

European Parliament Agenda

The European Parliament agenda is an explosion of colours, each of which holds a specific meaning. So get your colour code crash course now!