On Tuesday 19 November, the Finnish Presidency of the Council of the European Union sent the Member States a ‘reflection paper’, a copy of which was sent to EUROPE, with a view to relaunching discussions on the revision of the European regulations on air passenger rights (261/2004 and 2027/97).
While this issue has been at a standstill in the Council since mid-2015, Helsinki considers that “the time is getting ripe for moving air passenger rights forward”.
To this end, the Presidency first proposes to step back, in order to avoid stakeholders returning to their former positions and that discussions again reach an impasse as soon as they are resumed.
It therefore recommends that the EU Council’s Aviation Working Party should first and foremost consider the overall objective of the air passenger rights regime (APR) and its revision. It also wants it to examine the key issues that currently impede the achievement of the objective of the APR. Finally, it suggested that the working party look at “how to move forward”.
Putting forward some more concrete proposals, Helsinki considers that it would be interesting to consider, for example, replacing fixed compensation rates with a standard compensation linked to a percentage of the ticket price. According to the Presidency, such a formula would generally lead to a lower level of compensation in monetary terms, “but the system could be made fair from the point of view of passengers by having lower thresholds”.
In addition, Helsinki proposes considering limiting the derogations to a few clearly defined cases or even removing the possibility for air carriers to invoke extraordinary circumstances.
In order to move forward, it is recommended that discussions, instead of focusing on standard compensation, focus this time more on processes, service operations, redirection and information tasks.
“It is not sufficient to merely look at the rights of passengers, but what is happening when irregularity occurs and what is being done to rectify it”, the Presidency believes.
Presented in March 2013, the Commission's proposal for a review of air passenger rights aims to “clarify the rules which apply if a flight is delayed or cancelled […], make sure that European airlines are carrying out their activities on a liberalised market under harmonised conditions”.
The European Parliament adopted its position at first reading in February 2014 (see EUROPE 11012/5). In the EU Council, the last substantive debate on this subject took place in June 2015, during the last Transport Council, under the Latvian Presidency (see EUROPE 11334/7). (Original version in French by Damien Genicot)