Michael McGrath has said he will not hesitate to pull up governments in EU countries found to be undermining the rule of law, in his new role as European commissioner for justice.
A committee of MEPs in the European Parliament voted to confirm Mr McGrath’s appointment to the EU job on Tuesday following a three-and-a-half hour hearing.
Mr McGrath is set to take over the commission brief covering justice, consumer protection and the rule of law.
The role would see him lead the European Commission’s efforts to take on countries like Hungary, over the continued erosion of rights and rule of law by prime minister Viktor Orban’s right-wing populist government.
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Addressing the parliamentary hearing, Mr McGrath said he would be an “honest broker”, but national governments could not be allowed to take an “a la carte” approach when choosing when to follow EU laws. “Nobody should be under any illusions, I will be prepared to act in a strong and forthright way to ensure the rule of law is respected by every member state,” he said.
As justice commissioner, Mr McGrath said he would push through plans to tie future EU funding to adherence to democratic and civil society norms and rules.
“There will be tensions of course, there will be differences of opinion with member states ... We are seeing a deterioration in too many instances, we have to reverse that trend,” he said. “We are seeing slippage and we are seeing backsliding, we are seeing rule-of-law concerns, not just in one country or two countries.”
Tineke Strik, a Dutch Green MEP, said the commission needed to take more concrete action when member states were found to be going backwards on that front.
Mr McGrath said he agreed there needed to be more “follow-through” by the EU executive, and that he did not want his job to be limited to an “endless cycle of report writing”.
The former Fianna Fáil minister for finance said he would also bring forward a Digital Fairness Act that would tackle misleading advertising by social media influencers and apps with “harmful” addictive features.
Politicians needed to “ask questions” about whether the sphere of online influencers needed more oversight, he said. Products such as vaping products and procedures such as plastic surgery were being presented to children by influencers, he said.
Mr McGrath said the proposed EU legislation would address the practice of businesses making online subscriptions difficult for customers to cancel. There was also a need for more powers at EU level to investigate faulty products, given online shopping platforms were “flooding” the European market with products that did not meet the bloc’s safety standards, he said.
During the hearing, Mr McGrath was questioned by Fabrice Leggeri, an MEP from Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party in France, who criticised the European Court of Justice as undermining the democratic “will of the people” in countries.
Mr McGrath pushed back against the criticism of the EU court, drawing a round of applause from MEPs. “We have a good system of checks and balances in place, we have to accept the primacy of EU law,” he told Mr Leggeri.
He said he would bring forward a “comprehensive” plan to tackle corruption across the 27 member states and would strengthen the operation of the European Arrest Warrant.
Following the hearing, a meeting of 149 MEPs from several parliamentary committees voted to confirm Mr McGrath’s appointment to the EU job, with 125 votes in favour, sources said.
Mr McGrath stepped down as finance minister in June this year after being nominated by the Government to become Ireland’s next EU commissioner.
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