The Swedish Presidency of the Council of the EU submitted a revised text for the Critical Raw Materials Act to the Member States on 12 June. According to the document, seen by EUROPE, the changes are minor compared to the previous version detailed here (see EUROPE 13191/14). According to a European diplomat, negotiations are proceeding apace in the Council with a view to proposing a text to the Member States’ ambassadors (Coreper I) at the end of the month.
In this text, the Swedes maintain the targets for extraction (10%), transformation (50%) and recycling (20%) that they had previously proposed. Similarly, the list of critical raw materials (Annex II) and the list of strategic critical raw materials (Annex I) remain unchanged.
However, the Commission should review these two lists every 3 years - rather than 4 years - after the regulation comes into force, the authors of the text now believe.
Furthermore, the previous compromise hardly touched on the obligations imposed by the Commission on Member States to provide information on supply risks or on their strategic stocks of raw materials. For her part, the European Parliament’s rapporteur, Nicola Beer (Renew Europe, German), substantially amended these sections in her first draft report (see EUROPE 13183/7).
The Swedish Presidency seems to have taken a step towards addressing potential concerns on this issue: the 12 June version of the text submitted to the Council still states that the Commission must make public information on risks to raw material supplies, except in cases where this could “endanger the protection of trade and business secrets and other sensitive, confidential and classified information”. The same logic applies to the provision of information by the EU27 to the Commission on their strategic stocks.
For more information on the recent changes, see the compromise text: https://aeur.eu/f/7kl (Original version in French by Léa Marchal)