Actorness and Power of the European Parliament in the Policy Formulation and Adoption of the Refugee Relocation Scheme and the EU-Turkey Statement

This paper analyses the actorness and role of the post-Lisbon European Parliament in the consultation procedures leading to the introduction of the two refugee relocation Council Decisions (EU) 2015/1523 and 2015/1601, and the later amendment of the latter by means of the EU-Turkey Statement, or Council Decision (EU) 2016/1754. Post-Lisbon legislative developments for the European Parliament in the AFSJ have long been described by scholarly literature as structurally noticeable for what concerns a change in institutional rules; nevertheless, the institutional maturation of the European Parliament was far from meeting the expectations of further liberalization and advancement of the EU towards a pro-migrant approach (Trauner and Ripoll Servent, 2015), let alone giving the EP an independent voice comparable to that of the Council on JHA Affairs (Niemann, 2012). This paper will test whether the case studies hereby under analysis are further proof of the EP’s weakness in influencing policy outputs under consultation, or rather they show some degree of legislative influence of the EP by previously studied tools such as delaying, issue-linkage, and support from the Commission (see Kardasheva, 2009). In an attempt to test this, the paper will first explore early advocacy attempts of the EP to urge for a European response to migratory flows in the interinstitutional power play with the Commission and the Council; it will then examine the positions of EP political groups, as both formally stated in their position papers and as expressed in roll-call votes and amendments to the texts under analysis, in order to inspect intra-group and inter-group power dynamics, as well as national and cross-national coalition-building within the EP.