Manuel Fajardo Palarea, senator elected for Lanzarote and La Graciosa, was elected this Tuesday as first secretary of the board of the Joint Congress-Senate Committee for the European Union, a parliamentary body in charge of processing and debating issues that affect the community administration.
The socialist senator managed to gather a broad majority for his appointment, with 25 votes in favor of his candidacy, compared to 2 in favor of the one sponsored by VOX and 2 abstentions. From this moment on, the commission's board is made up of the president Susana Sumelzo, deputy of the Socialist Group, and the vice-presidencies of Lucía Muñoz Dalda and Pablo Hispán Iglesias, from the Confederal Unidas Podemos and Popular groups in Congress respectively. The board is completed by the second secretary María Del Carmen Leyte, from the Popular Group in the Senate.
The Joint Congress-Senate Committee for the European Union is one of the most important committees for the Canary Islands, as it is the entity where the debate on policies referring to the outermost regions, among which is the archipelago, takes place.
Since the implementation of the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009, it has also been one of the parliamentary committees with the greatest activity and responsibility, in charge of issuing reports and appeals on the principle of subsidiarity in the application of European directives, the revision of Community Treaties and participation in Eurojust, the agency for the reinforcement of judicial cooperation between Member States, and Europol, the European Union Agency for Police Cooperation.
Likewise, it is the parliamentary body in charge of receiving information on applications for accession to the European Union, an issue of special relevance in the international context following the requests for access from Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.