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Role of the European Council in the pre-legislative stage of the EU legislative process

Publication

Abstract

The aim of the master thesis "The role of the European Council in the pre-legislative phase of the European legislative process" is to analyse position and influence of the European Council before proposing an official legislative proposal by the European Commission in the EU's legislative process. This pre-legislative phase of a designing of a European legislation is important, though informal.

The aim of this master thesis it to find out how strong is the European Council in an agenda setting when it comes to a European legislation and to what extent the Commission is inspired or follows the European Council's conclusions when proposing a legislation. According to many authors who this thesis referring to and their research that this thesis follows, an importance and influence of the European Council has been growing a lot, recently.

In their view, it has been happening primarily during serious political or economic crisis. The Commission's position as the only official proposer of a European legislation weakens in that moments while influence of the EU summits grows.

The question is if it is true and how much we can really argue that during European crisis the EU's executive power is so weakened that it does not - without ex ante "permission" and ex ante "consultation" with the summits - allow itself to design and propose an EU legislation. For answering this question, we will analyse legislative and non-legislative proposals that are related to the migration crisis.