MEPs from all political families welcomed the interinstitutional agreement on compliance with trade rules during a plenary debate on Monday 18 January. The text, brought by Marie-Pierre Vedrenne (Renew Europe, France) was the subject of a European Parliament/EU Council agreement on 28 October 2020 (see EUROPE 12592/14).
While some feared the Greens/EFA group would refuse to approve the text, MEP Reinhard Bütikofer (Greens/EFA, Germany) reassured his colleagues in this respect: “we had reservations about the Commission’s first proposal, but a good compromise has been reached”, he said. The European Parliament has indeed succeeded in including services and intellectual property rights in the scope of the text. This will make it possible to include these two sectors in the scope for retaliatory measures against non-Member States that do not respect the terms of a free trade agreement or the international trade rules defined by the WTO.
Sustainable development: Many MEPs also stressed the need to go even further and to be able to take coercive measures in the event of non-compliance with the sustainable development chapters in free trade agreements.
They called on the European Commission to make a proposal to this effect as soon as possible. The European Commissioner for the Environment, Virginijus Sinkevičius, replied that the Commission had already started the preparatory work and that public consultations would be forthcoming. “The Commission plans to publish this proposal by the last quarter of 2021, but is ready to speed up the process if necessary”. (Original version in French by Léa Marchal)