EUROPEAN COUNCIL ROLLING CHECK-LIST OF COMMITMENTS

The Rolling Check-List of Commitments to Date (available on the Internet www.europarl.eu/thinktank ) is a product of the European Council Oversight Unit within the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS), the EP's in-house research service and think tank. As part of its work, the unit maintains a rolling database of all the European Council's commitments and responsibilities, which is updated and published regularly, with an indication of follow-up to date.

The European Parliament is strongly committed to Better Law-Making, and particularly to the effective use of impact assessment and evaluation throughout the legislative cycle. It is in this spirit that enhanced powers for stronger executive bodies can and should be balanced by greater scrutiny and oversight, especially in respect of the implementation of EU law and policies.

The Parliament's administrative capacity to support parliamentary committees and individual Members in exercising ex-post scrutiny and oversight of the executive has accordingly been strengthened - to provide stronger and deeper analysis of the transposition, implementation and enforcement of EU secondary law, and more generally, the impact, operation, effectiveness and delivery of EU law and policy in practice.

The European Council Rolling Check-List of Commitments  keeps track of those decisions and follows up on their implementation: who has to carry out the decision, in what time span, and by what means? The Check-List is updated four times a year. The structure and contents of the publication stem from the Conclusions of the European Council. The Check-List covers seven broad policy areas contained in seven chapters: 1) Financial and Economic Affairs; 2) Employment and Social Policies Agenda and Strategy; 3) Competitiveness; 4) Climate and Energy Strategies; 5) Freedom, Security and Justice; 6) External Policies; and 7) Development. A traffic light system helps readers distinguish at a glance the progress achieved on an issue of interest: green for decisions that were carried out in full, orange for those being implemented but not yet finished and red when things are blocked or when there is no evolution.

The information is displayed in different columns: the Commitment column displays all relevant conclusions of the European Council on a specific policy area; whereas in the State of Play column the status of the commitment or request in the institutions is displayed, in the form of binding and non-binding legal instruments.

The EPRS ‘Rolling Check-List of Commitments to Date’ is also one of the few of its kind which are publicly available. The idea behind it is providing the reader with easy access to the political guidelines defined by the European Council at its meetings and most importantly to guide her/him through the policy cycle and gradually show how each policy issue has been dealt with over time by the relevant institution or actor. In this sense, the checklist is meant to be used as an information tool by an informed audience in search of reliable and readily accessible data.