European Parliament in Luxembourg granted a city the right to host a number bodies, including the Secretariat of the Assembly (now of the Parliament). Despite the 1965 agreement however, the Parliament's seat was a source of contention. Wishing to be closer to the activities in Brussels and Luxembourg, a few plenary sessions were held by the Parliament between 1967 and 1981 in Luxembourg instead of Strasbourg – against the wishes of France and in 1981 it returned to holding sessions entirely in Strasbourg. There are a handful of buildings in Luxembourg used by the Parliament. The city hosts the Secretariat of the European Parliament
Strasbourg and home to 13% of the Grand Est region's inhabitants. The transnational Eurodistrict Strasbourg-Ortenau had a population of 915,000 inhabitants in 2014. Strasbourg is one of the "de facto" capitals of the European Union (alongside Brussels and Luxembourg), as it is the seat of several European institutions, such as the Council of Europe (with its European Court of Human Rights, its European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines and its European Audiovisual Observatory) and the Eurocorps, as well as the European Parliament and the European Ombudsman of the European Union. The city is also the seat of the Central Commission