White smoke at the EU Council. A week after calling for more time to refine their text (see EUROPE 13332/1), the Member States’ ambassadors to the European Union (Coreper) finally approved the Belgian Presidency’s fourth compromise by a majority vote. Only Germany abstained.
This latest version makes relatively few changes to the previous one but clarifies and strengthens the notion of “European Union interest”, which governs the conditions under which the Union, through the Commission, can automatically take control of the investigation process.
This is based on a number of criteria, including at least one of the following three: - the extent and seriousness of the alleged forced labour; - the link between products and infrastructures designated as critical; - their ‘significant impact on the internal market’. For this last criterion, suspect products are presumed to have a significant impact when they are present in at least three Member States.
Member States have the option of opening and conducting an investigation on their own initiative in cases where the existence of a ‘Union interest’ is not proven.
The final text also adds the possibility of banning components created using forced labour, in addition to complete products. This proposal comes from Austria and has been endorsed by a large number of Member States.
For their part, the companies implicated can submit additional information relating to the investigation at several points during the process.
SMEs are not exempt from the regulation, but their size and economic resources must be taken into account before an investigation is launched.
The penalties remain unchanged from previous versions: where it is clear that Article 3 on the ban on these products has been infringed, the Commission will have to adopt a delegated implementing act within a maximum period of 6 months. This may involve banning the offending product, withdrawing it from the market, recycling it (rather than destroying it) or rendering it inoperable.
“With this regulation, we want to ensure that these kinds of products have no place in our single market, whether they are made in Europe or abroad. The [Belgian] Presidency of the Council has the ambition of finalising the inter-institutional negotiations before the end of this legislature”, said Pierre-Yves Dermagne, Belgium’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Economy and Employment.
The first round of negotiations is scheduled for Tuesday 30 January. (Original version in French by Isalia Stieffatre)