Brussels, 24/07/2006 (Agence Europe) - On 24 July, after lengthy discussion taking up most of the day, the Finnish EU Presidency was able to note the Council's political agreement on the two chapters of the 7th Framework Programme for Research and Development (FPRD). Adoption of the texts is purely a formality. It opens the way to the second reading for the Community part of the programme subject to European Parliament codecision, and closes the procedure for the Euratom programme on which the Parliament is only consulted. Isolated, Austria agreed over lunch to withdraw its veto blocking adoption of the Euratom chapter of the framework programme. As the EP had already done, the Presidency admitted that the FPRD was a whole and that the Community part could not be disassociated from the nuclear chapter, and that Austria could not indefinitely block the whole of the FPRD in order to have the some €500 million earmarked over five years to nuclear fission and radio protection solely earmarked for nuclear safety and security, when the text had already suggested priority for such issues. After obtaining the addition of a number of formal precisions in the text, Austria agreed to waive its reserve thus opening the way to adoption of the nuclear programme, the large part of which is absorbed by the building of an international thermonuclear experimental reactor ITER (€1.947).
With this problem being resolved, discussions in the afternoon were able to focus on the delicate issue of human embryo stem cells. A group of eight Member States had displayed reservations about this question (EUROPE 9237) but Slovenia withdrew its reservations about it at the beginning of the meeting as Italy was giving its support to the German proposal to exclude Community funding for supplemental embryos or cells taken from them. The objective of the German proposal was to ban funding the destruction of embryos and prevent any encouragement of producing supplemental embryos. The presidency chose to use the text of the parliamentary amendment as inserted by the Commission in its common position. It is the European Commission that became the key to the agreement between research ministers. The Commission produced a twelve point declaration in which it makes a commitment to not amend its practice in the 6th RDFP and to not select research activities that destroy human embryos for Community funding, including activities using stem cells. This declaration enabled Germany and Italy to lift their reservations and the presidency to point out that qualified majority had been gained for the adoption of the common position. Lithuania, Austria, Malta, Slovakia and Poland requested that their opposition be placed on the record.
The agreement with parliament on the need to separate space and security to make two distinct priorities in the Cooperation programme (which will consist of ten), the Council has chosen a compromise position on breaking down the budget, which is expected to facilitate negotiations with the EP. The new breakdown (in millions of €) proposed by the Council, followed by amounts put forward by the EP and the amended Commission proposal: (a) Cooperation programme: 32 365; EP 32 492; Commission 32 292 which is broken down as follows: - information society: 9110; EP 9020; Commission 9110; - health 6050; EP 6134; Commission 5984; - transport, including aeronautics and Galileo: 4180; EP 4150; Commission 4180; - nanotechnologies and materials: 3500; EP 3467; Commission 3467; - energy: 2300; EP 2385; Commission 2265; - agro-food and biotechnologies: 1935; EP (idem) Commission (idem); - environment including climate change: 1900; EP 2935; Commission 1886;- space including GMES: 1430; EP 1429; Commission (2858 for space and security); - security: 1350; EP 1429; - socio-economic and human science: 610; EP 657; Commission 607; (b) Ideas programme (ERC): 7460; EP 7560; Commission 7460; (c) personnel programme: 4728; EP 4777; Commission 4727; (c) Programme Capacities: 4217; EP 3944; Commission 4291 which is broken down as follow: - research infrastructures: 1850; EP 1708: Commission 2008; - research for SMEs: 1336; EP 1328; Commission 1266; - research potential: 370; EP 320; Commission 350; - science in society: 280; EP 329; Commission 359; - knowledge regions: 126; EP (idem); Commission (idem); - activities of international cooperation: 185; EP 133; Commission 182; - coherent development for research projects (new): 70; (e) non-nuclear activities in the CCR: 1751; EP and Commission (idem).