Understanding trilogue: Informal tripartite meetings to reach provisional agreement on legislative files

Thanks to successive Treaty revisions, the European Parliament has acquired the status of legislator on an equal footing with the Council. Today the ordinary legislative procedure (Article 294 Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union − TFEU), previously known as co-decision, covers a vast amount of policy areas. In order to pass legislation, Parliament, representing the EU citizens, and Council, representing the governments of the EU Member States, have to agree on an identical text, which requires time and negotiations. The complexity of the EU legislative process has been sometimes criticised for being lengthy and subject to gridlock, thus the risk of not responding to societal problems in a timely manner. To overcome this criticism, the legislators have developed informal contacts to speed up the legislative process while ensuring representativeness and oversight. One of the tools commonly used today to ensure the effectiveness of the legislative process is trilogue, defined as 'informal tripartite meetings on legislative proposals between representatives of the Parliament, the Council and the Commission'. These tripartite meetings have been the object of criticism for a number of reasons, including the fact that the number of participants is limited and that they take place beyond close doors. Due to the absence of any explicit reference in the Treaties, trilogues started on a very informal basis in the early 1990s and evolved over time. At the beginning, the institutions filled the legal void with informal practice that was subject to an increasing degree of formalisation over time and then resulted, inter alia, in successive modifications of Parliament Rules of Procedure (RoP). These modifications were driven by the need to ensure that trilogues efficiently support the legislative process in Parliament while remaining fully transparent and representative. Today, RoP define the key elements upon which trilogues are built, how to conduct negotiations, and how to ensure that both committees and plenary are fully informed and can exercise their oversight role. Still, some elements such as the number and frequency of meetings, the practical conduct of negotiations depend very much on the nature of the legislative file to be negotiated, and thus remain uncodified.