National Council President Andreas Khol voiced his satisfaction that they had been successful in achieving some concrete results. In concrete terms, the President touched on the participation of the national parliaments at European level which was taking place on two separate tracks. On the one hand this took place within the framework of the national constitutions via the national governments and on the other hand via the preliminary examination of the Commission's legislative proposals. The members of parliament had to travel along these two tracks, whereby they also had to make use of the existing instruments provided by the Treaty of Amsterdam for subsidiarity control.
Khol advocated the simultaneous dissemination of information on the various initiatives to the EP and the national parliaments so that they could examine these together and react accordingly. As the conference had heard, there was nothing to be said against allowing this pre-screening procedure to come into force immediately.
COSAC, which had to coordinate the national comments and consider the question of best practices, and also had to discuss the legislative programme once a year with the Commission, would have a key role in these processes. In this sense the national parliaments ought to further extend their collaboration. He said that Austria would take concrete steps in this direction in May within the framework of COSAC.
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