At a time when the S&D, Renew Europe, Greens/EFA and The Left political groups in the European Parliament had confirmed, on Wednesday 7 June, their support for the compromise amendments to the proposal for a Nature Restoration Law, which will be voted on 15 June in Parliament’s Committee on Environment (ENVI), the EPP group organised a press conference to reaffirm its total rejection of the text (see EUROPE 13192/22).
No alternative compromise text was presented by the EPP, which expects the European Commission to produce an impact study and to present a new forward-looking proposal on 5 July, at the same time as its proposal on new genomic techniques.
On this occasion, Christine Schneider (German), the EPP group’s negotiator on this legislation, accused Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans of having put pressure on MEPs “in his office” to try to obtain a majority during the vote. She also accused him of having, the day before, used the ‘Business and Biodiversity’ (B&B) platform, organised by DG Environment, “to provide a roadmap for launching a campaign with a list of MEPs, their e-mail addresses and their social network accounts”.
Esther de Lange (Dutch), vice-president of the same group, said she was very surprised by the Commission’s attitude in “a lobbying coordinated by DG Environment. A list of MEPs to contact to organise a campaign on Twitter is not the role of the Commission”. She added: “The Commission does its own lobbying. It steps out of its role. It’s a very serious matter. It finances the “speaking points” to be distributed. We take this very seriously”.
Invited to react, the European Commission did not wish to respond to Frans Timmermans’ alleged attitude, but stressed in a press release that the ‘Business and Biodiversity’ platform “is one of several forums supported by the Commission that bring together stakeholders on a specific topic (and) like the other platforms, the B&B platform receives administrative and financial support of the Commission including through website hosting”.
“Members of the European Business & Biodiversity Platform can use the logo to showcase that they are committed to taking action towards a nature positive world”, says the Commission.
According to the institution, “the European Business & Biodiversity Platform nor the European Commission are responsible for the actions and/or messages of its members. The use of the logo does not imply a recommendation or endorsement by the European Commission”.
The 30 compromises supported by the parties to the left of the House and the Liberals take up the ambition of the report by César Luena (S&D, Spanish) (see EUROPE 13098/3) - the restoration of 30% of land and sea by 2030 as a general collective EU objective - but lower the level of targets by type of habitat.
Link to the compromise amendments : https://aeur.eu/f/7BT (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)