Dutch Senate

Please find below information about the institution selected.

Contact point for EU matters:

Phone: +31 (0) 6 1175 0371 Email Mr. Jeron Den Hartog

Phone: +31 (0)6 1119 9981 Email Ms. Eline Valk

Parliament websites:
Europapoort (NL)
Eerste Kamer (NL)

The Kingdom of the Netherlands is a constitutional monarchy with a bicameral parliament known as the States General. The legislature consists of the government and the parliament.

The Senate in a nutshell

The 75 members of the Senate (Eerste Kamer) of the States General are elected by the members of the Provincial Councils. These elections are indirect: the voters in the Nether-lands elect the members of the Provincial Councils, who in turn elect the members of the Senate within three months. The seat of the Dutch parliament is the Binnenhof in The Hague.

EU affairs

In 2009 the Senate adopted a new EU procedure. As a result, the standing committee for European Affairs lost its ‘gatekeeper’ role. The committee now plays a coordinating role in scrutinising cross-committee proposals and can be requested by the Senate’s committees to scrutinise a specific proposal. The coordinating activities include preparing for the Parliamentary Debate on European Affairs, maintaining interparliamentary contacts, assessing the institutional dossiers and providing the impetus for debate on European affairs in the Senate.

Subsidiarity check – how does this work?

Each Senate committee itself selects the proposals it wishes to subject to parliamentary scrutiny. This can be done in two ways:
1) through the annual Work Programme of the European Commission;
2) through the weekly overview – drawn up by the staff of the Senate – of newly published European proposals.

After publication of a European Commission proposal selected by a Senate committee, it is placed on the committee’s agenda for discussion of the procedure by which it will be dealt with. When putting a European proposal on the agenda, a committee should therefore decide as quickly as possible whether 1) the committee will scrutinize the Commission proposal 2) if there may be subsidiarity objections and, if so, 3) whether it wishes to submit an opinion to the European Commission. If a committee decides to carry out a subsidiarity check, it should convene a meeting for submission of comments. Any subsidiarity and/or proportionality objections of the committee are set out in a letter, which must be approved in a plenary session before being sent to the European institutions. In the course of this procedure, cooperation is also sought with the House of Representatives (Tweede Kamer) in order to ascertain whether the letter can be sent on behalf of the States General as a whole. A period of 8 weeks is available for this purpose.

A Senate committee may also decide to enter into (written) consultations with the Dutch government about a European proposal. It may recommend a particular course of action by the government in the Council negotiations or otherwise exchange views on the government’s opinion on the proposed European measures, as evidenced by the record of the government’s assessment of a new Commission proposal.

Further information on how EU proposals are dealt with can be found in:
* Table setting out the stages in the deliberation process and the monitoring of compliance with the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality

Information updated on 05.03.2019