The Cooperation procedure was one of the legislative procedures of the European Community, the 1st of the three pillars of the European Union.
The cooperation procedure was laid down in Article 252 (formerly Article 189c) of the EC Treaty and was introduced by the Single European Act.
It gave the European Parliament greater influence in the legislative process by allowing it two "readings" of proposals from the European Commission.
Since the entry into force of the Treaty of Maastricht, it has applied to the following areas in particular:
- transport,
- non-discrimination,
- implementation of Article 101 (funds of the European Central Bank or the central banks of the Member States),
- the Social Fund,
- vocational training,
- trans-European networks,
- economic and social cohesion,
- research,
- environment,
- development cooperation,
- health and safety of workers (Article 138),
- the Social Policy Agreement,
- etc.
With the Treaty of Amsterdam, the scope of the cooperation procedure has been considerably reduced in favour of the codecision procedure (Article 251 of the EC Treaty).
The cooperation procedure applied then only to certain aspects of economic and monetary union and in in the Intergovernmental Conference of February 2000, the European Commission argued in favour of replacing the cooperation procedure by the codecision procedure for legislative acts.
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