Negotiators from the European Parliament and the Council of the EU held the first trilogue on Tuesday 17 May on extending the legal basis for the EU’s Covid certificate which will expire at the end of June and which the European Commission proposed to extend until the end of June 2023 (see EUROPE 12946/8).
The first meeting allowed for discussion of the points of contention between the two parties, between the delivery date of the Commission’s evaluation of the functioning of the EU Covid certificate and the content of these evaluations, which the Parliament would like to see also cover national practices.
According to one source, a compromise is within reach on the date of the Commission’s report which will be used to decide whether the certificate tool is still useful. The Parliament wants this evaluation to happen in December this year and the EU Council has set early February 2023 in its mandate. The discussion suggests that a middle-ground solution is possible, although the Commission and EU Council would have argued that the EU may be in a pandemic wave again during the winter and that the end of the certificate should therefore not be rushed.
On the content of the Commission’s report, Member States do not like the idea of national assessments, which have no legal basis and are not, in their view, within the Commission’s remit. No new date was set on Tuesday, but the co-legislators will have to agree by the end of June.
“Everyone shares the objective of extending the regulation, because we don’t know what will happen in the next few months”, says another source. “A number of points have been raised by the Parliament which go beyond what is necessary to extend the regulation. The Parliament also wanted to review some of substantive issues, which did not lead to a conclusion”, the source also confirmed. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)