Institutional seats of the European Union are based in Luxembourg City along with the European Investment Bank. The Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions are entirely based in Brussels while the European Central Bank is based in Frankfurt and Europol is the only agency to have its seat fixed by the treaties, in The Hague. Separately, the Treaty of Nice establishes Brussels as the venue for all formal summits of the European Council after 2004. However some extraordinary sessions are sometimes held outside the city. The European Council's seat is however fixed by a declaration rather than a protocol, meaning it is
Seat of the European Central Bank cars and barricades. The ECB's new headquarters was reportedly selected as the venue for the demonstration so as to highlight the contradiction between the ECB's lavish spending on its own US$1.4-billion building while forcing cuts and market reforms on countries like Greece and Cyprus. Ulrich Wilken, an organiser, said: “Our protest is against the ECB, as a member of the troika, that, despite the fact that it is not democratically elected, hinders the work of the Greek government. We want the austerity politics to end.” The pan-European protests included members of Greece's radical left governing party Syriza and Spain's left-wing