Committee on legal affairs : confirmation of first readings, entry into force of the Treaty of Amsterdam

PURPOSE: consequences of the entry into force of the Amsterdam Treaty on legislative procedures under way. CONTENT: Following the entry into force of the Amsterdam Treaty on 01.05.1999, the Community legislature has to take a decision regarding Commission proposals put forward prior to this date and which find themselves at various stages in the legislative procedure. The entry into force of the new Treaty will have different consequences for these pending procedures: 1) the articles of the EC Treaty, constituting the legal base or bases of all the proposals based on this Treaty will be renumbered. 2) the legislative procedure will be different for a certain number of pending proposals (in particular, the move from the co-operation or consultation procedure to the co-decision procedure and the extension of compulsory consultation of the Committee of the Regions). This means that, in other respects, that for procedures which, from now on, are governed by co-decision, the Parliament will become co-legislator. 3) for a limited number of procedures, the modifications arising from the Amsterdam Treaty will involve changes in the legal base. 4) for some proposals, the legal base will be radically changed: this relates to two proposals for Directives based on the social protocol which, from now on, will be based on a legal base of the EC Treaty as well as proposals concerning justice and home affairs which will have be replaced. The Commission has drawn up in an annex to its communication the list of all the proposals put forward before 1 May 1999, accompanied by the practical consequences for each of them arising from the entry into force of the Amsterdam Treaty.�