Costly Compromises Stir Fury With the European Union
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Version 0 of 1. BRUSSELS — To the sort of dysfunction that provokes frustration with the European Union, add its highest appeals court. When member states could not agree on the hiring process for new judges to deal with a backlog of cases, they simply gave one to each of the 28 countries in the bloc. They originally planned for just nine, wary of the ballooning bill. This unwieldy club of nations — and such costly compromises — are a constant flash point in the debate over the European project. As Britain heads to the polls on Thursday over whether to leave the European Union, many supporters of the so-called Brexit consider Brussels a bloated bureaucracy that sucks funds and resources. They have a point, at least in some examples. While the group of nations professes mutual support, it is often hobbled by a lack of consensus that leads to dubious decisions. There are duplicate Parliament buildings in France and Belgium. The union’s digital security agency is on a remote Greek island with direct flights to crucial European capitals only during the summer months. And a plan to streamline the top layer of the European Commission, the executive body in the administrative capital of Brussels, has been undermined by national infighting. The European courts are particularly good fodder for critics. Perched on a plateau above the city of Luxembourg, the court is composed of two main tribunals. The Court of Justice is a sort of supreme court for the bloc, while the General Court is the top appellate court and the first stop for companies like Microsoft when appealing fines imposed by Brussels for breaking antitrust laws. The headquarters is adorned with ostentatious (read: pricey) flourishes. A number of entryways are decorated with Baccarat crystal chandeliers and glittering chain mail wall coverings. Translators and administrators work in gold-tinted office towers. Judges are chauffeured to work and to meetings in a leased fleet of more than 80 cars. When the court first pushed to hire new judges in 2011, the political wrangling started immediately. At that time, the General Court was facing a serious backlog: Files of pending cases took up a third of a mile of shelving. Vassilios Skouris, the former president of the Court of Justice, proposed hiring 12 new judges, on top of the existing 28. Wary of the potential bill, governments agreed to nine new judges. But progress stalled when member states bickered over which of them would get to make the appointments. The deadlock eased three years later in 2014, when Mr. Skouris proposed one additional judge for each country as a “structural and lasting response” to the backlog. The enlargement would mean justice is “speedier, more efficient and of consistently high quality” and “also allow the court to handle any sudden surge in filings,” Koen Lenaerts, the current president, said in a statement to The New York Times. It was the sort of national horse-trading and jockeying for influence that has pervaded a number of decisions. Twelve times a year, under European law, more than 750 lawmakers and thousands of assistants shuttle from Brussels to a second locale, 220 miles away in the French city of Strasbourg. The arrangement adds at least €114 million every year to the bloc’s budget to maintain a gleaming glass building used for legislative sessions less than two months a year. Sovereign priorities have also hindered efforts to streamline the European Commission. Since the bloc has mushroomed to 28 members from its original six, there are not enough influential jobs to go around. Portfolios overlap, creating tensions. During the last decade, member states moved to cut the commission’s size by about a third and to take turns occupying fewer seats. But that idea mostly collapsed when Irish voters, sensitive about being left unrepresented in Brussels for any length of time, voted in a 2008 referendum to reject a revised European Union treaty containing those changes. Margaritis Schinas, the chief spokesman of the commission, said the makeup of the body and its size was determined by governments. The commission had “taken important organizational steps,” he said, by grouping commissioners into teams, and by focusing more resources on issues of major concern. Quarreling over jobs and influence led in 2003 to the parceling out of 10 new agencies to member states, some of them far from Brussels. Greece won the right to host the digital crime agency and put it on Crete. The Greek island is better known for tourism and farming than for 21st-century law enforcement. Even the head of the group, the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security, Udo Helmbrecht, calls the location a “problem for attracting people” and estimates that consolidating it with a second office in Athens would save money. Hiring more judges also meant spending more money. The new judges at the General Court will earn basic monthly salaries of about €20,000, or about $22,460. With staff and offices, each judge costs about €1 million each year, and the expansion will add roughly 5 percent to the court’s budget after other savings are taken into account. By contrast the original plan for nine judges would have cost about half as much. Naturally, the proposal provoked fury among some European lawmakers. The plan showed “deep contempt for European taxpayers’ money” and “would be poorly received by the European public,” António Marinho e Pinto, the lead negotiator on the issue at the European Parliament, wrote in October 2015. German concerns about cost helped push the court to make additional internal savings. Governments finally reached a consensus late last year — or at least what counts for consensus in the European Union. Last December, a majority of member states including Germany approved the plan. Belgium and the Netherlands abstained. Britain protested that it would “result in greater demands being made” on member states; it voted against the plan. “European institutions have so little good will to spare, so bulking up the court is shortsighted in the extreme,” said Alberto Alemanno, a law professor at HEC Paris, a business school, and a former clerk at both tribunals. “But I can’t imagine governments being able to agree to anything else, and that’s just as worrying.” Because it took five years to reach an agreement, the judges had already begun trying ways to streamline the workload. They hired new clerks and cut back on hearings. The backlog has fallen slightly, and they are closing more cases. Some figures suggest a surge in productivity. Now, critics are warning that the new judges might not have enough work to do. By the end of 2014 the court had already “eaten into the backlog without the addition of a single additional judge,” one long-serving judge of the General Court, Franklin Dehousse, wrote in a critical report published in April by Egmont, a research organization. The doubling of the size of the court was “manifestly excessive.” But the “incapacity to compromise on E.U. appointments is not limited to judicial ones,” he added, saying this “weakness has clearly become a source of useless spending by the E.U.” |