The volume of EU legislation and the significance of its impact means that it is essential for the House to have an effective means of scrutiny. Although the current system has its strengths, there are weaknesses in that it tends to be seen as a minority activity, of interest to only a few members. The Committee hope that the recommendations of this report will reinvigorate the consideration of EU business. They want to see a system that: examines the negotiating stance adopted by the UK Government; examine EU proposals at an early stage; provide a free flow of information; be well integrated with the other activities of Parliament.

This book assesses the many changes that have occurred within the European Parliament and in its external relations since the Lisbon treaty (2009) and the last European elections (2014). It is undoubtedly the institution that has evolved the most since the 1950s. Despite the many crises experienced by European integration in the last years, the Parliament is still undergoing important changes in its formal competences, its influence on policy-making, its relations with other EU institutions, its internal organisation and its internal political dynamics. Every contribution deals with the most recent aspects of these evolutions and addresses overlooked topics, providing an overview of the current state of play which challenges the mainstream intergovernmental approach of the EU. This project results from research conducted at the Department of European Political and Governance Studies of the College of Europe. Individual research of several policy analysts of the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS) have contributed to this endeavour.

This open access book deals with Article 7 TEU measures, court proceedings, financial sanctions and the EU Rule of Law Framework to protect EU values with a particular focus on checks and balances in EU Member States. It analyses substantive standards, powers, procedures as well as the consequences and implications of the various instruments. It combines the analysis of the European level, be it the EU or the Council of Europe, with that of the national level, in particular in Hungary and Poland. The LM judgment of the European Court of Justice is made subject to detailed scrutiny.

The contributors to this book are all members of EuropEos, a multidisciplinary group of jurists, economists, political scientists, and journalists in an ongoing forum discussing European institutional issues. The essays analyze emerging shifts in common policies, institutional settings, and legitimization, sketching out possible scenarios for the European Union of the 21st century. They are grouped into three sections, devoted to economics and consensus, international projection of the Union, and the institutional framework. Even after the major organizational reforms introduced to the EU by the new Treaty of Lisbon, which came into force in December 2009, Europe appears to remain an entity in flux, in search of its ultimate destiny. In line with the very essence of EuropEos, the views collected in this volume are sometimes at odds in their specific conclusions, but they stem from a common commitment to the European construction.

This handbook offers a comprehensive picture of the European activities of national parliaments in all 28 member states of the European Union. In the aftermath of the Lisbon Treaty, it assesses the extent to which national legislatures actually matter in European governance.

Article 16 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, recognizing 'the freedom to conduct a business in accordance with Union law and national laws and practices', has been the subject of intense debate over the value of business freedoms within EU law. Problematically, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) relied on this provision in a series of highly deregulatory judgments, invoking Article 16 to undermine the effectiveness of employee-protective legislation. Business Freedoms and Fundamental Rights in European Union Law assesses the value placed on the freedom to conduct a business as a fundamental right within the legal reasoning of the CJEU. Arguing that this freedom can only properly be understood in relation to its wider constitutional and social rights functions, it uses the employment law context as a case study, given the tensions that exist between the (economic) rights of employers and the (social) rights of employees. Examined holistically, the book demonstrates that granting fundamental rights status to business freedoms is not inherently deregulatory, with such freedoms also encapsulating 'social' rights, values, and interests. The freedom to conduct a business, therefore, emerges as a malleable fundamental rights concept, dependent on the underlying constitutional context, whether that be within national constitutional law, the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, general principles of EU law, or in the arrangements governing the United Kingdom's departure from the EU. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Tax competition in the form of harmful tax practices can distort trade and investment patterns, erode national tax bases and shift part of the tax burden onto less mobile tax bases. The Report emphasises that governments must intensify their cooperative actions to curb harmful tax practices.