The European Parliament's Role: Towards New Copenhagen Criteria for Existing Member States?

The new own‐initiative report the European Parliament is preparing has three aims: to provide a formal evaluation of the recent initiatives by the Commission and the Council; to present a viable alternative; and to do so in the form of a legislative report, so as to obtain a formal reaction from the Commission. The institutions have proposed several possible solutions to the crisis of the Rule of Law in the EU. It is time to put them into a coherent system. The report will focus on five issues: the body for a permanent country‐by‐country monitoring of democracy, the Rule of Law and fundamental rights in the EU; the role of the Agency for Fundamental Rights; whether and how infringement procedures should be revisited in this context; what a proper pre‐Article 7 Treaty on European Union (TEU) procedure should look like; and what a valid legal basis for the proposed changes should be.