Members of the European Parliament’s Committee on Transport and Tourism (TRAN) will be voting on the draft report on the revision of the Directive on harmonised River Information Services (RIS) on inland waterways in the community on Tuesday 18 March. According to compromise amendments obtained by Agence Europe, the TRAN Committee will support the opinion of the rapporteur, Tom Berendsen (EPP, Dutch), on the scope (see EUROPE 13551/10).
Mr Berendsen proposed that the implementation and operation of RIS should focus on all inland waterways and inland ports of Member States that are part of the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) and are directly linked to the inland waterways and inland ports of another Member State. He wanted to exclude the Union’s inland waterways and ports which are isolated from the rest of the TEN-T.
MEPs would also like the European Commission to present a report to the European Parliament and the Council of the EU no later than three years after the entry into force of the text, covering the potential benefits and costs of extending the scope of the directive to inland waterways and ports of Member States not included in this new scope.
With regard to third countries, in particular neighbouring countries, the TRAN Committee considers that cooperation would be useful to ensure connection and interoperability between the RIS platform and the national RIS of these third countries. It believes that Member States should actively seek this cooperation and encourage their participation in cross-border projects, provided that they adhere to the same level of cyber security.
To this end, it suggests that the RIS platform should be open to contributions from third countries whose inland waterways are linked to the European inland waterway network and which wish to cooperate and provide data relating to their network. This would be on condition that the quality and format of the data is identical to that of the Member States. Contributing third countries could use and benefit from the European Reference Data Management System (ERDMS) and the RIS platform in the same way as Member States, provided they adhere to the same level of cyber security.
Read the compromise amendments: https://aeur.eu/f/FZC (Original version in French by Anne Damiani)