70.

Calls on the Commission as the guardian of the Treaties and as the body responsible for ensuring that Union law is correctly applied, under the supervision of the Court of Justice of the European Union: — to inform Parliament of its assessment of the Fourth Amendment to the Fundamental Law and its impact on cooperation within the EU; — to be determined in ensuring full compliance with the common fundamental values and rights set out in Article 2 TEU, as violations thereof undermine the very foundations of the Union and mutual trust among Member States; — to launch objective investigation and start infringement proceedings whenever it considers that a Member State has failed to fulfil an obligation under the Treaties and, in particular, is violating the rights enshrined in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU; — to avoid any double standards in the treatment of Member States, making sure that, in similar situations, all Member States are treated in a similar manner, thus fully respecting the principle of equality of the Member States before the Treaties; — to focus not only on specific infringements of EU law, to be remedied notably through Article 258 TFEU, but to respond appropriately to a systemic change in the constitutional and legal system and practice of a Member State where multiple and recurrent infringements unfortunately result in a state of legal uncertainty, which no longer meets the requirements of Article 2 TEU; — to adopt a more comprehensive approach to addressing any potential risks of serious breaching of fundamental values in a given Member State at an early stage and immediately to engage in a structured political dialogue with the relevant Member State and the other EU institutions; this structured political dialogue should be coordinated at the highest political level of the Commission and have a clear impact on the full spectrum of negotiations between the Commission and the Member State concerned in the various EU fields; — to create — as soon as risks of violations of Article 2 TEU are identified — an ‘Article 2 TEU/Alarm Agenda’, i.e. a Union values monitoring mechanism, to be dealt with by the Commission with exclusive priority and urgency, coordinated at the highest political level and taken fully into account in the various EU sectoral policies, until full compliance with Article 2 TEU is restored and any risks of violation thereof are defused, as also envisaged in the letter of the Foreign Affairs Ministers of four Member States raising with the President of the Commission the need to develop a new and more effective method of safeguarding fundamental values in order to place greater emphasis on promoting a culture of respect for the rule of law, taken into account by the Council conclusions on fundamental rights and rule of law and on the Commission 2012 Report on the Application of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union of 6 and 7 June 2013; — to hold meetings at technical level with the services of the Member State concerned but not to conclude any negotiations in policy fields other than Article-2-TEU-related ones until full compliance with Article 2 TEU has been ensured; — to apply a horizontal approach involving all the Commission services concerned in order to ensure respect for the rule of law in all fields, including the economic and social sector; — to implement and if necessary update its 2003 communication on Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union (COM(2003)0606) and to draw up a detailed proposal for a swift and independent monitoring mechanism and an early-warning system; — to regularly monitor the correct functioning of the European area of justice and to take action when the independence of the judiciary is put at risk in any Member State, with a view to avoiding the weakening of mutual trust among national judicial authorities, which would inevitably create obstacles to the correct application of the EU instruments on mutual recognition and cross-border cooperation; — to ensure that Member States guarantee correct implementation of the Charter of Fundamental Rights with respect to media pluralism and equal access to information; — to monitor the effective implementation of rules ensuring transparent and fair procedures for media funding and state advertising and sponsoring allocation, so as to guarantee that these do not cause interference with freedom of information and expression, pluralism or editorial lines taken by the media; — to take appropriate, timely, proportionate and progressive measures where concerns arise in relation to freedom of expression, information, media freedom and pluralism in the EU and the Member States on the basis of a detailed and careful analysis of the situation and of the problems to be solved and the best ways to address them; — to address these issues in the framework of the implementation of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive in order to improve cooperation between regulatory bodies of the Member States and the Commission, bringing forward as soon as possible a revision and amendment of the directive, and notably of its Articles 29 and 30; — to continue the dialogue with the Hungarian Government on the conformity with EU law of the new provision of the Fourth Amendment enabling the Hungarian Government to impose a special tax in order to implement EU Court of Justice judgments entailing payment obligations when the state budget does not have sufficient funding available and when the public debt exceeds half of the gross domestic product, and to suggest adequate measures to prevent what may result in a breach of sincere cooperation as enshrined in Article 4(3) TEU;