The European Parliament will indeed defend an end to geo-blocking for a very limited number of radio and television programmes. On Tuesday 12 December, the whole of Parliament ratified the negotiating mandate granted a fortnight ago by the judicial affairs committee - JURI (see EUROPE 11909). Given this result, Tiemo Wölken (S&D, Germany) announced his intention to withdraw his name from the report.
It should be recalled that the legislative proposal seeks to promote the cross-border provision of ancillary online services and facilitate the digital retransmission of television and radio emissions from other member states (see EUROPE 11624). On 21 November, the JURI committee decided, against the opinion of the rapporteur, Tiemo Wölken, to restrict the application of the country of origin principle to news and current affairs programmes (rather than all ancillary online broadcasters such as MyTF1, as proposed by the Commission). In response, the rapporteur activated clause 69c of the internal European Parliament regulation, which enables it, if it obtains 10% support from MEPs, to put the mandate to a vote.
Socialists divided
On 12 December, a majority of MEPs voted in favour of the negotiating mandate as defined by the JURI committee (344 votes for, 265 against, with 36 abstentions). According to the information we have received, Tiemo Wölken did not receive the entire support of his colleagues at the S&D: during an internal vote the day before, 20 socialist MEPs (mainly French and Italian) announced that they would not follow the line advocated by the rapporteur and would support the negotiating mandate. 31 Socialists, on the other hand, intended to oppose it and 2 of them were going to abstain. According to the information we received, the liberals were also divided. The divisions were mainly political and geographic, with MEPs on the right and/or coming from countries where cultural creation is important generally more in favour of the mandate.
Tiemo Wölken withdraws his name from the report
The rapporteur, Tiemo Wölken, responded by announcing his intention to withdraw his name from the report and indicating that, “This is not a balanced document. Consumers will have to use circumvention devices to have access to certain content. It is not by doing this that we're going to promote creativity in Europe”. He also denounced “the influence of the lobbies”.
The president of the JURI committee, Pavel Svoboda (EPP, Czech Republic), will probably therefore take charge of the report as a “neutral representative" of the committee. If this information is confirmed in the coming days, the latter will be in charge of representing and defending the position adopted by his parliamentary committee. The S&D group will have to nominate a new referent, who will only have the status of a shadow rapporteur during the negotiations.
Forthcoming Council mandate
The focus is now on the Council. The Committee of Permanent Representatives to the EU is due to meet up on 15 December to discuss the final proposal of the Estonian compromise. If a qualified majority of member states approve it, the said compromise will serve as a negotiating mandate for the next rotating Presidency (Bulgaria). (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)