After 8 months of negotiations at Council working group level, the Member States’ ambassadors to the EU (Coreper) will be asked to approve on Friday 23 July the EU Council’s position on two draft regulations from the Health Union legislative package (see EUROPE 12760/5).
One aims to better equip the EU-27 to deal with cross-border health threats and the other to extend the mandate of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).
Both texts should be approved by the ambassadors, including the one on cross-border threats, which raised the most concerns.
Some States, including France, had regretted that the initial proposal was not, in their opinion, in line with the principle of subsidiarity. However, they should have received sufficient guarantees in this respect. In an opinion issued last week, the Council’s legal service assured that the latest text presented by the Slovenian Presidency was in line with this principle.
In particular, with regard to the provisions on future state preparedness plans for cross-border threats (Article 6) and the review of these by the EU (Article 8), the legal service considered that the text on the table did not go beyond the rules laid down in the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU, an EU source confirmed to EUROPE.
However, other states regret that the changes made to address subsidiarity concerns - about cross-border threats, but also about the ECDC - have weakened the text originally proposed by the Commission. They fear that these texts, as they stand, will not allow a genuine European health policy to take shape.
They should nevertheless support the negotiating mandate presented on Friday, “so that negotiations with the Parliament (trilogues) can start as early as September”. They will then rely on these trilogues to come up with a “more ambitious” final text, a diplomatic source told EUROPE. (Original version in French by Agathe Cherki)