article 7 - Protocol No.2

The establishment of an "early warning system" regulated by Art. 6 and 7 of Protocol No. 2 was invoked for the first time by the Constitutional Convention. The current formulation of Art. 7.1 of Protocol No. 2 reflects, verbatim, the provision as it was formulated in the Constitutional Treaty. Instead, the paragraph 3 of Art. 7 was introduced with the Treaty of Lisbon. The mechanism for starting an early warning system revolves around the power, attributed to national Parliaments, to issue opinions -- in relation to the European legislative procedure - on compliance with the principle of subsidiarity. The reason for introducing preventive control on the principle of subsidiarity in this phase of the legislative procedure, is that "as the principle of subsidiarity was a principle of an essentially political nature, implementation of which involved a considerable margin of discretion for the institutions, monitoring of compliance with that principle should be of an essentially political nature and take place before the entry into force of the act in question". Moreover, the (preventive and hence) political nature of the early warning system makes it also an excellent instrument of accountability.