Brussels, 28/01/2016 (Agence Europe) - The European Parliament's legal affairs committee gave its approval by a wide majority on Thursday 28 January to the interinstitutional agreement reached in December on the legislative proposal introducing minimum rules on trade secrets in the European Union (see EUROPE 11454).
Constance Le Grip (EPP, France), who steered the negotiations in the European Parliament, described the text as “balanced”, on the one hand, providing protection for the skills and knowledge that make up the intangible and technical heritage of our companies and maintaining innovation and competitiveness and, on the other, ensuring the freedom of the press and its investigative work, protecting whistleblowers and safeguarding worker mobility.
Under the new rules, a trade secret is taken to mean any information which is secret, has commercial value because it is secret, and has been subject to reasonable steps to keep it secret. Journalists, individuals reporting illegal activity who are acting in the general interest or to protect legitimate rights that are recognised in EU law, and workers who reveal a secret to their representatives acting in the legitimate exercise of their duties will be protected from prosecution for revealing trade secrets.
The Greens/EFA Group fiercely opposed the adoption of the new rules. Pascal Durand (France) was critical of what he saw as a “dangerous text” that will allow less scrupulous companies to practise abuses with complete lack of transparency. “The effect of the very broad definition given to trade secret will be to protect any piece of information relating to the work of a company”, he added, using the Volkswagen scandal to illustrate how difficult it is to uncover and prove fraud. He called for European protection for whistleblowers, which the Commission appears to have been delaying.
The day before the vote, a number of civil society organisations, such as Corporate Europe Observatory and the European Public Health Alliance (EPHA) had urged the MEPs to reject the legislative proposal. “The impact of this text on the legal regime of public interest disclosures (such as crucial information on medicines' safety and efficacy - clinical trials data...) remains unclear too. As secrecy becomes the default status for internal corporate information, the price of these legal ambiguities will be paid by everyone”, they argue in a press release. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)