Germany's Constitutional Court has declared that parliament must participate more actively in emergency decisions on eurozone aid, rejecting measures to turn over these powers to a select body of representatives.
Germany's highest court ruled on Tuesday that a select body of nine parliamentarians cannot alone make emergency decisions on eurozone financial aid, calling instead for the entire legislature to participate more actively.
The Constitutional Court based its decision on the "overall budgetary responsibility of parliament."
The German lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, had passed a law that empowered a nine-member body to make rapid decisions on behalf the 620-member legislature during emergency economic situations involving the health of the euro, the common currency of 17 European Union member states.
The nine-member body is chosen from the 41-member budget committee. All parties in parliament are represented among the nine members, with the governing coalition in the majority. The body would vote on decisions regarding the disbursement of money from the temporary European bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), which is designed to halt the spread of the sovereign debt crisis.
Parliamentary rights
Norbert Lammert, the president of the Bundestag and a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-right coalition, said that the nine-member body was a democratically legitimated institution.
"The German Bundestag voted with an overwhelming majority for this measure," Lammert said.
Two parliamentarians from the center-left Social Democrats, Peter Danckert and Swen Schulz, originally filed the case before the Constitutional Court, arguing that the right of parliament to decide over budgetary issues was infringed by the nine-member body. The Constitutional Court had suspended the implementation of the nine-member body in October 2011 pending review of its constitutionality.
"It cannot be the purpose of parliamentarianism to pay lip service to representatives and otherwise allow the government to do everything the way it wants," Schulz said. "That's not democracy."
slk/acb (AFP, dpa)
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