Talk:Informal trilogue meeting

Change to Informal Trilogue Meeting

I have moved this article to informal trilogue meeting, as those are the meetings most commonly referred to by trilogue and most relevant to discussion. I have also rewritten the entire article and added sources. This should solve previous confusions between formal and informal trilogue meetings. I have not gone through all of the pages that linked to formal trilogue meeting, so some of those may need to be updated to reflect this change.

For anybody interested, there is plenty of scholarly literature to elaborate this article, both on the procedure of trilogues and on transparency concerns within trilogues.

Wyndham Freeman (talk) 21:05, 3 May 2024 (UTC)

Formal?

Why is it "Formal"? None of the current references use that word and per e.g. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/ordinary-legislative-procedure/en/interinstitutional-negotiations.html any agreement reached in trilogues is informal and has to be approved separately in formal procedures afterwards. Anssi~enwiki (talk) 21:02, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

It's 'formal' because it's a procedure provided for in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (article 294), entering into trilogue negotiations is not optional after having reached a certain stage in the legislative procedure, and the outcome – whether it's the approval of a joint text or not – has consequences. First, the treaty provides that if after the second reading the Council does not approve all amendments made by Parliament, 'the President of the Council, in agreement with the President of the European Parliament, shall within six weeks convene a meeting of the Conciliation Committee'. It further provides that the proposed act 'shall be deemed not to have been adopted' if a joint text is not approved within six weeks (can be extended to eight weeks). And lastly, it provides that the proposed act 'shall be deemed not to have been adopted' if a joint text is approved within six weeks but not consequently adopted by Council and Parliament within another six weeks. So while it's true that any agreement reached in trilogue negotiations must be approved separately by Council and Parliament, not adopting the approved joint text makes the legislative procedure come to an end, as does not approving a joint text in the trilogue meeting itself. Jeroen N (talk) 09:10, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

I'm afraid that the article confuses "formal" and "informal" trilogues to some extent. Informal trilogues are meetings conducted between the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission during the first reading. There is no Treaty provision addressing them, some basic rules can be found in the rules of procedure of the European Parliament. In essence, it is a way for the colegislators to avoid the complicated rules of legislative procedure and take a shortcut trough a legal grey area. The source quoted seems to address informal trilogues primarily, the formal ones are rarely held. The conclusions of the European Ombudsman on this topic might prove to be informative in this respect: https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/decision/en/69206. Thus, when a lack of transparency of "trilogues" is criticized, the actual criticized phenomenon will be the informal trilogues. Moreover, it can be argued that any lack of transparency will be more severe in the case of informal trilogues. First, they essentially sideline the procedure established by the Treaties. Second, they happen almost at the very beginning of the procedure (the responsible committee in the European Parliament should agree on a legislative report beforehand), this means even less public scrutiny than in the case of the formal trilogue. I will try to look at this article in more depth in the near future. Prufrax (talk) 23:18, 27 October 2020 (UTC)

Confusion between trilogue meetings and conciliation committees

The article is confusing two different concepts, namely trilogue meetings and conciliation committees. The former is an informal meeting that takes place on a regular basis between the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission to coordinate different things between the institutions. The latter is a formal procedure, regulated by the Treaties, at the very end of a legislative procedure, in case the European Parliament and the Council cannot agree on a legislative proposal. In fact, over the last decade or so, the number of trilogue meetings have increased at the expense of reconciliation committees, which has led to a less transparent process as the informal trilogue meetings are not subject to the same transparency requirements as the formal processes. This distinction has to be clarified in the article. Just a few references: [1] [2] --Glentamara (talk) 16:32, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Legal Europe

This article is currently the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 29 January 2024 and 15 May 2024. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Wyndham Freeman (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Wyndham Freeman (talk) 02:09, 3 May 2024 (UTC)