European Parliament Agenda: The Week Ahead 16 – 22 March 2015

Committees

Ukraine. International Trade Committee MEPs will vote on whether Ukraine should be granted up to €1.8 billion in EU macro-financial assistance for economic and political stabilisation and reform. This would be the biggest grant of financial help that the EU has ever made to a non-EU country under the Macro-Financial Assistance (MFA) programme. (Thursday)

Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The International Trade Committee and trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström will debate the proposed investment protection and investor-to-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions in the EU-US TTIP talks. Members will also hear from experts at a public hearing on the TTIP’s potential benefits for EU workers, professionals, consumers and entrepreneurs. (Wednesday)

e-Call. A deal with the Council on a life-saving automatic emergency call system for cars will be put to a vote in the Internal Market Committee. The “eCall” system would use the 112 number to call the emergency services automatically, enabling them to reach crash scenes faster and thus save lives and reduce the severity of injuries.

Delegations

Data protection/EU-US. Data protection, mass surveillance and counter-terrorism initiatives, including Passenger Name Records (PNR), will be among the topics discussed by a Civil Liberties Committee delegation travelling to Washington to meet members of the US Congress and US Government representatives, among others. MEPs will also update their US counterparts on the EU data protection reform and the EU PNR proposal. (Monday to Friday)

Euronest/eastern neighbourhood countries. Ideas on how to improve relations between the EU and its eastern neighbourhood, in a context radically altered in the past year by Russian aggression and events in Ukraine, and the possibility of signing EU association agreements with some countries in the region, will be debated at a three-day meeting of the Euronest Parliamentary Assembly in Yerevan (Armenia). Euronest brings together MPs from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine and MEPs. (Monday to Wednesday).

President’s diary. EP President Martin Schulz will be on official visit in China from Monday to Wednesday, where he will meet President Xi Jinping and top officials, and hold a press conference on Tuesday. On Thursday, Mr Schulz will address the European Council, followed by a press conference.