Debate: The Rule of Law and the consequences of the ECJ ruling
Date: WEDNESDAY, 16 FEBRUARY 2022
Speaker: Johannes Hahn
Language: EN

Today’s hot-off-the-press rulings are being analysed as we speak. Now that we have the Court’s rulings, the Commission will finalise the guidelines on the practical application of the Regulation. We are well advanced on preparing the guidelines. You are familiar with this document, as we have consulted the Parliament and Member States. So our aim is to proceed quickly with adapting them in the light of the Court’s ruling. We cannot make concessions when it comes to protecting both the Union’s financial interests and the founding values of the European Union, and we have a choice of tools to address both issues. The key is choosing the right tool for the specific problems we need to solve. I want to stress this: all our efforts here must be about solving problems. The Conditionality Regulation is part of the Union’s budgetary toolbox. Its specificity is that it aims to protect specifically the Union budget from relevant breaches of the principle of the rule of law, which today was one of the core outcomes of the Court ruling. In fact, it requires a sufficiently direct connection between such breaches and the Union’s budget or the Union’s financial interests. The Regulation complements the rules of the Common Provisions Regulation for the Union funds. The Financial Regulation checks audits, investigations by the European Anti—Fraud Office (OLAF) and the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), and the resulting financial corrections. When it comes to protecting the Union’s founding values, the Commission and the Union have a number of instruments at our disposal, independent of links to the Union budget. This rule-of-law toolbox consists, among other things, of infringement procedures, Article 7 of the Treaty, the procedure in the European Semester, and the annual Rule of Law Report. The instruments vary because they are tailored to address the specific situations in Member States, aiming at promoting, preventing and responding to rule of law issues. We are currently managing the largest Union budget that there has ever been. Let me assure you that the Commission is set to make optimal use of all the tools at its disposal to protect the Union budget and the Union’s financial interests against threats, actual or potential – and this without losing time. In this spirit, the Commission has been applying this budgetary conditionality regime since the start, at the beginning of 2021, and we remain fully committed to enforcing it. We have been monitoring the situation across Member States, and we are working to identify possible breaches in Member States that may fall within the scope of application of the Regulation. Last year, as you are well aware, we sent letters to two Member States to request information to feed our analyses. This has set into motion an exchange with the said Member States, and we are currently analysing the substantive and comprehensive replies. Now we are at the stage where the Court of Justice has confirmed the validity of the general regime of conditionality, which we, of course, very much welcomed, as do, I suppose, the majority in this House. So we can go ahead. The Commission will carefully analyse the reasoning of the two judgments and take them into account for the ongoing work under the general regime of conditionality. We need to have all these elements in place to ensure a solid and fair process, and we need this solid process precisely because we are the ones taking our responsibilities, and we are the ones who will, no doubt, be challenged at every step. As President von der Leyen also confirmed today, the conditions of the Regulations are fulfilled and we will act now with determination. Today’s judgment confirmed that we are on the right track and, may I say, we didn’t expect anything else.