EP budget expenses for EP's Parliamentary Delegations

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Dear European Parliament,

Under the right of access to documents in the EU treaties, as developed in Regulation 1049/2001, I am requesting documents which contain the following information:

I would like to gain more information on the expenses of the European Parliament on the activities of the EP’s delegations to third countries/organisations/assemblies.
In the annual budgets for the European Parliament only a global budget can be found for the expenses of “parliamentary assemblees, interparliamentary delegations and other delegations”. However, for the budget year of 2011, the EP made public the costs of the ten most expensive delegations (see http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/a..., p.50).
Referring to this example, I would like to ask you whether it would be possible to give me a complete overview of the costs of all delegation activities for the current parliamentary legislature 2009-2014. Similarly as to the document referred to above, such overview would include for each budgetary year the type of meeting (e.g. EU-Russian Parliamentary Cooperation Committee), the place of meeting (e.g. Strasbourg, Moscow, …), the date (e.g. 01/02/2009-02/02/2009), the number of participating MEPs (and if possible also the number of the third country/organisations’ participating MPs), and the total costs.

Many thanks,

Yours faithfully,

Daan Fonck

Registre, Europäisches Parlament

Ref : A(2014)2919

Dear Mr Fonck,

We acknowledge receipt of your request. You will receive a reply within 15 working days.

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European Parliament
European Parliamentary Research Service
Transparency Unit
Directorate for the Library

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Registre, Europäisches Parlament

Ref : A(2014)2919/MT/en

Dear Mr Fonck,

We are hereby responding to your request received by Parliament on 03 March 2014 for more information regarding:

I) EP discharge questionnaires (2010 - 2012);
II) An overview of the costs of all delegation activities for the current parliamentary legislature (2009-2014).

I) The document you refer to in your request is a response to the discharge questionnaire, drawn up by the Secretary General of Parliament to respond specifically to those questions put to him by MEPs of the Budgetary Control committee, ahead of the EP discharge for the year 2011. The existence of this type of document and the information provided in it is entirely dependent on those questions put to the Secretary General by the relevant committee, which vary year on year.

• In this way, information provided by the Secretary General in the replies to the discharge questionnaire for 2012 with regard to costs of EP delegation activities corresponded to the following requests from the committee:

a) Total cost of MEP travel expenses (see question 65 on MEPs' travel costs);
b) Total and average cost of inter-parliamentary delegations in 2012 (see question 104);
c) Maximum cost of an inter-parliamentary delegation outside the EU per day and per Member in 2012 (see question 105);
d) Total and average annual cost of parliamentary committee delegations outside the EU (see question 107);
e) Maximum cost of a committee delegation outside the EU per day and per Member in 2012 (see question 108).

See: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/a...

• Information provided by the Secretary General in the replies to the discharge questionnaire for 2011 with regard to costs of EP delegation activities in corresponded to the following requests from the committee:

a) The ten most expensive delegation trips, in absolute terms, and the ten delegation trips where the average cost per MEP was highest (see question 30.3)
b) Related costs of delegation trips to third countries (see question 30.5)

See: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/a...

• Information provided by the Secretary General in the replies to the discharge questionnaire for 2010 with regard to costs of EP delegation activities in corresponded to the following request from the committee:

a) Ten most costly (per participating MEP) delegation trips inside and outside the EU (see p.22)

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/a...

II) A number of different types of EP delegations exist, such as committee delegations, inter-parliamentary delegations, ad-hoc delegations, delegations to multilateral parliamentary assemblies and election observation missions. Depending on the type of delegation, competence for authorising the delegation travel is split between the EP Conference of Presidents and the EP Bureau.

Due to the above fact, and to the fact that expenditure of delegation travel is linked to various budget lines managed by different departments, the comparative information you have requested has not yet been compiled by Parliaments' services, other than in those formats provided in response to questions put directly to the Secretary General by the relevant committee and for those specific years (see above).

In addition to the documents referred to in point I, a wide number of documents are made available during the EP discharge procedure on the CONT website , which could be relevant for your research. Please consult for example the annual reports of DG Internal policies (DG IPOL) and DG External policies (DG EXPO) for more information about the number of visits of EP delegations.
See here: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees...

For example, DG IPOL organised 54 delegations in 2012:
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/a...

While DG EXPO organised 121 interparliamentary and 22 committee delegations in 2012:
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/a...

If we can be of any further assistance, please let us know.

Kind regards,

Transparency - Public Access to documents
Library and Document Management Directorate
DG Presidency
European Parliament