Brussels, 10/12/2010 (Agence Europe) - On Friday 10 December, EU Internal Market Commissioner Michel Barnier accepted a request from 11 member states (France, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Sweden and the United Kingdom) to introduce enhanced cooperation to create a European patent. He told the Competitiveness Council that such requests were acceptable. After a decade of negotiations, the Council is facing deadlock on the issue because Italy and Spain refuse to agree to the language system being proposed, of patents being translated into three EU languages - English, French and German.
The Commission will therefore put forward on 14 December a draft decision setting out the scope and aim of this second use of the enhanced cooperation mechanism in the history of the EU (following its first use for divorce). As requested by the participants, the draft decision will be based on suggestions from the Commission and compromise documents from the Belgian Presidency. Barnier pointed out that any extra translation requirements would have to be restricted to the time ahead of the interlocution of high quality computerised (automatic) translation systems, and the patent would have to be accessible to any company in the EU. The chair of the Council, Belgian politician Vincent Van Quickenborne, said that the EU had made an important step forwards and it was the “cherry on the cake” for the Belgian Presidency. French politician Eric Besson said that it was not an attack on Italy and Spain because the door was open and the 11 countries hoped that their Italian and Spanish friends would soon join them in the enhanced cooperation. Italy is hopping mad. Italian under-secretary of state for European affairs, Alfredo Mantica, described the attitude of other countries as “painful”, saying that the European Commission had been “complicit” in it. He announced strong opposition from the Italian government and parliament, backed by political parties across the board, whether in power or in opposition. He said that Italy would be standing up to arrogance and was prepared to go on the barricades over this issue. Giving the green light for enhanced cooperation was doomed to failure, he said, because there would be thousands of ways of sticking a spanner in the works. Spain said that enhanced cooperation sat uneasily with the Council's 2009 agreement to unanimously decide on the language system for the patent. Both Spain and Italy have written to the EU institutions, pointing out that this cooperation would strengthen divisions in the EU and prevent future agreements, he explained. (L.C./Gp/transl.fl)