European Parliament tools, sources and resources
3. How to search on the Legislative Observatory
3.1. The case of the horizontal directive against discrimination
In the case of the horizontal Directive against discrimination, by inserting "Equal Treatment", one easily arrives at Directive 2008/0140 (APP).
At the top left of the form or procedure file, the Legislative Observatory presents us with the number and procedure in question. For the Equality Treatment Directive of 2008 it is an APP or a Special Legislative Procedure: the Council must deliberate unanimously, after obtaining the approval of the European Parliament. As we saw earlier, the Lisbon Treaty, in fact, integrated the fight against discrimination into all policies and actions of the Union (Article 10 of the TFEU), making the special procedure necessary.
The fiche shows that the Directive was proposed in 2008 by the Commission and, after being discussed, was approved in plenary in the European Parliament in 2009. Furthermore, it implies that we await its approval by the Council.
Among the information contained in the fiche, the information on the parliamentary committee that examined the proposal may be useful; in this case the responsible committee is the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs - LIBE.It may be useful to investigate who the speakers are, which political group they belong to, how the debate and the vote took place. In the case of an ordinary procedure it is interesting to see what the amendments are and who proposed the amendments, etc.
Using IPEX, on the other hand, we can look at the position of the member states and we learn that the following states have not approved the directive: Denmark; Finland; Germany; Lithuania; Sweden; Holland; United Kingdom. We can therefore learn more about the reasons for the non-approval by each of the 7 countries.
