While the Member States are still negotiating the specifics of the European cybersecurity scheme ('EUCS'), France has sent a letter to the legal services of the Council of the EU to check the conformity of recent amendments to the text (see EUROPE 13392/13).
The new version, dated 22 March this year, removes the legal security criterion, which obliged foreign suppliers to set up a joint venture or cooperate with a European company in order to obtain the highest level of security in the scheme.
This security was intended to combat the transfer of the most sensitive data outside Europe and, potentially, to foreign governments or digital giants.
This letter, published by freelance journalist Luca Bertuzzi on X, is dated 11 April. In order to “clarify the legal reasoning behind this latest proposal”, France asks for “written and legal clarifications on the possible interaction between EU law and national law in the context of the Cybersecurity Act (CSA) and the EUCS system currently under discussion”.
By leaving Member States free to create a criterion at national level equivalent to the legal criterion that has been abolished on a case-by-case basis, the Commission's proposal has been accused by France of contravening the principle of theEUCS, which was intended precisely to harmonise systems and avoid fragmentation between the 27 Member States.
The latest version of the text should have been adopted on Tuesday 16 April, but the vote was thwarted by the French opposition.
France is therefore going it alone, advocating a stricter version of security and sovereignty guarantees, equivalent to its own 'SecNumCloud' system. Although the vote has been postponed, the EUCS must still be finalised before the end of the current mandate.
According to several sources, players in the sector are criticising the opacity of the discussions and the lack of consultation with the industry on the part of the European delegations.
This is what led to the publication of the open letter from 18 European companies last week (see EUROPE 13392/13), as well as the reaction of Cigref, the association that brings together the digital departments of major French companies.
See the letter: https://aeur.eu/f/bun (Original version in French by Isalia Stieffatre)