Humanitarian aid
Since the Lisbon Treaty came into force, the EU's humanitarian aid action is ruled by Article 214 of the Treaty of the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). Humanitarian aid is a shared parallel competence: this means that the EU conducts an autonomous policy, which neither prevents the Member States from exercising their competences nor makes the EU's policy merely “complementary” to those of the Member States. The Lisbon Treaty introduced, for the first time, humanitarian aid as a policy in its own right in the Treaties.