Inaugural 2024-2029 mandate plenary session: which unfinished dossiers will new MEPs have to deal with?

Since the last plenary session (22-25 April) of 2019-2024 mandate, legislative work inside the European Parliament (EP) has been put on hold. During the last phase of the legislative term, co-legislators attempted to conclude the ongoing interinstitutional negotiations (trilogues) and approve as many formal positions as possible. Besides this huge effort, not all dossiers reached the plenary for formal approval. Ahead of the first plenary session of the 2024-2029 mandate, we took a look at the unfinished business new MEPs will have to deal with.

Out of the 556 ordinary legislative procedure (OLP) files that the Commission proposed during this mandate (2019-2024), 119 legislative proposals (co-decision) are still pending. To these, around 60 dossiers under the interinstitutional special legislative procedure must be added. These dossiers will be the ones on which the next Parliament could be working on in the next legislative term. 

A procedure can be considered concluded if the file has been approved with the same wording both by the Parliament’s plenary and by the EU ministers and published in the Official Journal of the EU. This usually happens after an agreement between the two colegislators has been reached during trilogues, which have become standard practice for the adoption of EU laws and serve to streamline the legislative process.

Many of the dossiers still open have been approved by the Parliament on the basis of an agreement of this kind, and even if they have not been yet adopted by the Council, the possibility that the agreement is scrapped and that the Council decides to adopt further amendments to the Parliament’s position is rather slim. An exception could be the much-debated Nature Restoration Law, on which the Council is struggling to find a majority after Poland and Finland switched to the opponents’ camp.

A peculiarity of this parliamentary term was the extensive use of the corrigendum procedure, which is usually meant only for typos or minor errors. Indeed, before being formally approved, the text of the agreement has to undergo a necessary legal-linguistic finalization. This year, the Parliament had set an internal deadline at the beginning February for agreements in trilogues, so that this technical finalization could take place before the formal vote. However, this deadline could be extended up to mid-March, if the file follows the corrigendum procedure. This procedure would allow the Parliament to adopt the agreements prior to their technical finalization. The revised text will then be announced in plenary session as a corrigendum in the next legislative term. 

What about then all the dossiers on which the colegislators could not reach an agreement? These will be the files the Parliament will be dealing with after the elections.

The answer is that it depends on the stage of the procedure they reached. If the Parliament has adopted its position during a plenary session, this position will be binding for the next legislative term.

Examples include combatting late payments, the revision of the waste framework directive concerning textile and food waste, the revision of the water pollutants, accounting of greenhouse gas emissions of transport services, Green Claims and Soil monitoring law.

The work done on the files that did not reach the plenary before the elections, instead, can be resumed only with the approval of the Conference of Presidents (CoP). The Parliament may have already started working on these dossiers. Committee works have advanced as much as to agree on a mandate for institutional negotiations. Sometimes, negotiations may have started, but the co-legislators did not manage to reach a provisional agreement, as for example Rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse material online (CSAM). In others, the file has just been referred to the relevant committee, as the Passenger Mobility Package or AI liability Directive.

The EP governing body, comprising the EP President and political group leaders, will decide whether to continue working on “unfinished business” on the basis of input from parliamentary committees (Rule 240 of the EP’s Rules of Procedure). A decision from the CoP is expected indicatively in October 2024. If it deliberates to take forward this work is confirmed by the plenary, the newly elected Parliament will continue with the next stage of the relevant decision-making procedure, appointing, if needed, a new rapporteur. Traditionally, the CoP decides to resume all unfinished legislative work, with the exception of files that have become obsolete or for which a new proposal is expected. Thus, no big surprises are expected, unless there is a significant change in the equilibrium between political forces in the Parliament.