Negotiators for the European Parliament and the Council of the EU managed to reach an agreement on the main elements of the ‘anti-coercion’ regulation on Tuesday, 28 March, in the wee hours. Technical discussions are still needed so that the framework that was decided today can be implemented. Final trilogue negotiations should then take place to indicate an actual agreement and the end of negotiations on this text. The regulation is expected to allow the EU to impose countermeasures on a country that practises economic coercion against the EU or one of its Member States (see EUROPE 12849/1).
The European Parliament and the Council of the EU have come closer together on the elements that have separated them up to this point: mainly, the decision-making procedure and the scope of potential countermeasures.
Procedure
The Council of the EU was given the power to confirm the existence of a coercive action. Once the European Commission has submitted a proposal on the matter, Member States will have 8 weeks (indicative deadline) to approve it, by a qualified majority.
In a declaration by the three institutions, the European Parliament was anxious to specify that this procedure is unique and should not set a precedent. In addition, MEPs want to be kept informed throughout the whole procedure.
The choice of countermeasures to be imposed remains in the hands of the European Commission. Member States will be involved through committee procedure: the implementing regulation imposing a countermeasure will only be able to be adopted if a qualified majority of member countries approve it at that stage.
At the European Parliament’s request, deadlines have been added to the text for the different stages of the procedure. In total, the European Commission will have one year to impose a countermeasure after a coercive action has been reported. “Even this is quite long, and I hope this maximum timeline is not used in general, but it is a clear signal that this will not lead to a never-ending story”, said Bernd Lange (S&D, German), the text’s rapporteur in the European Parliament.
Countermeasures
The European Parliament’s negotiators also got the EU Council to broaden the list of potential countermeasures so as to include not only market access restrictions for chemicals and export controls but also the suspension of international obligations in the area of intellectual property or sanitary and phytosanitary standards.
Finally, the European Parliament succeeded in having redress measures to be demanded from third countries that are guilty of economic coercion included in the text.
The ‘anti-coercion’ instrument, as it is, is really a “gun”, according to Bernd Lange. “Sometimes, it’s necessary to put a gun on the table, even knowing that it is not used day by day”, he asserted on 28 March.
He does not think it should take very long to fine-tune the technical details. He hopes that the procedure for adopting the text will be able to be completed before the summer. “It’s not such a big legislation [in terms of] volume [...], so the translation [shouldn’t] be all [that] complicated. So, I guess we can move ahead quite quickly”, he told EUROPE. (Original version in French by Léa Marchal)