A new EU Body for Ethical Standards: Final destination or important interim step?
/As ECJ President Koen Lenaerts aptly confirmed in a paper on “mutual (yet not blind) trust”, “[i]t is said that ‘[t]rust takes years to build, seconds to destroy and forever to repair’”. For many, the European Union (EU) is not only geographically, but also emotionally very distant. In addition, various scandals have hampered trust in the EU. These scandals affected various institutions, such as the European Commission (e.g., Dalligate, Barrosogate and Oettigate), or recently the European Parliament (e.g., Qatargate). In the EU, we can identify an increasing reference to ethics (and morality) since the 1990s. In 2020 the author elaborated a study commissioned by the European Parliament, which suggested an ‘Independent Ethics Body’ (IEB). These suggestions were based on an analysis of the status-quo of ethics, integrity and transparency rules in EU institutions, etc. In June 2023 the European Commission published a proposal for the creation of an interinstitutional Ethics Body, the ‘Interinstitutional Body for Ethical Standards’ (IBES). Now we see the outcome of the negotiations between the EU institutions (see, for example, for the European Parliament), which shall be formally signed mid-May 2024. In other words, we now have a body for ethics in EU institutions and not an independent ethics body advising for example the European Commission on current policy topics with ethical implications, as in case of the ‘European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies’ (the EGE; equipped with a new mandate in 2021).
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