ABSTRACT
The 2006 comitology reforms were designed to give the European Parliament, for the first time, a significant role in the supervision of the content of implementing legislation. For most of the previous 45 years, Parliament’s predominant goal had been to eliminate comitology, or at least the procedures of which it disapproved most strongly. In that respect, it was singularly unsuccessful, though this merely reflects its lack of real influence on certain aspects of institutional reform, and the member states’ attachment to this form of decision-making. Even when the introduction of the co-decision procedure in 1993 provided Parliament with the means of enforcing its views on the content of primary legislation, it implicitly accepted comitology, by agreeing in the so-called modus vivendi not to block implementing arrangements in such legislation in return for a minimal degree of transparency in the workings of the comitology committees, but no real supervisory powers (Bradley 1999: 71–76). The failure of Parliament’s efforts to abolish or even stem the spread of comitology led the present author to wonder in 1996 if the Parliament were not ‘On the road to nowhere’ in this regard (Bradley 1997).
