During the third inter-institutional meeting on Tuesday 15 May, the European Parliament and Council of the EU managed to make progress on common technical specifications for normalisation. They did, however, continue to stall on the question of the scope of the directive accessibility requirements for products and services.
Provisional agreements were reached on normalisation and common technical specificities relating to articles 13 and 14 focusing respectively on the presumption of product and services compliance and harmonised standards referenced in the European Union Official Journal and common technical specifications.
In this connection, Parliament has made a concession on the question of common technical specifications and agreed that the European Commission can decide on common technical specifications for certain products and services requiring the harmonisation of standards at an internal market level.
Nonetheless, the question of the extent of the directive's scope, such as the built environment and transport, remains the main bone of contention between the two institutions. The European Parliament would like the directive to cover urban public transport and all new buildings or those involving significant renovation (see EUROPE 11862). The Council would like to limit its application to access to information and the front office and for the built environment, tele-payment services. Another area of difficulty involves: the inclusion (Parliament's position) or exclusion (Council’s position) of the directive’s scope to emergency call reception centres.
The questions of the EC label and the exemption of micro-businesses' products were also tackled but without any solution being reached. The next inter-institutional meeting is planned for the end of June but, according to several sources, another meeting could take place in the meantime. The Bulgarian Presidency of the Council of the European Union would like to reach an agreement under its mandate on this particularly difficult dossier. (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)