ABSTRACT
The European Commission is the largest Community institution. It employs two-thirds of all the established officials. It is fashionable to suggest that this is small when compared with a typical big city administration. Such comparisons are odious because the functions of the two organisations are disparate. This makes clear that the Commission is not the Council’s Civil Service acting under Council orders. The European Parliament’s ‘supervision’ of the Commission, to use the word which appeared in the original version of Article 137, rested on its ‘club in the closet’, the power of censure. To this power of censure others have been added in Treaty revision. The revision of Article 127 made in the Treaty on European Union provided for the governments of the Member States to consult the European Parliament (EP) on their choice of Commission President. The logical progression, in the Treaty of Amsterdam, was to subject the Member States’ choice to EP approval.
