Should hydrogen from nuclear power be counted towards the renewables targets? That’s exactly what France and some other countries demanded. But yesterday, the energy ministers rejected this idea and removed the project from the general orientation of the gas market directive. In return, the Commission signaled a concession on another level regarding nuclear power. Read more in the feature by Manuel Berkel.
Passenger cars and light commercial vehicles must be carbon-neutral from 2035. Yesterday, there was actually a decision: Germany abandoned its blockade position in the Council of Ministers in return for a compromise on e-fuels. Lukas Scheid reports on how the Commission intends to ensure that combustion vehicles can only be refueled with e-fuels.
What’s next for the EU’s China policy? Ursula von der Leyen will spell this out tomorrow in a keynote speech. Informed sources say that she wants to rebalance the relationship with Beijing. Not a US-style decoupling but a targeted reduction of dependencies on critical technologies and raw materials. Europe had better not rely on the goodwill of President Xi Jinping. The Commission President is also likely to announce concrete measures. The Commission is working on a proposal to make investments by European companies in security-relevant sectors in third countries subject to approval.
Yesterday, negotiators from the European Parliament and the Council agreed on a different tool: the anti-coercion instrument is intended to protect EU states from coercive economic measures more effectively, especially those taken by Beijing. Amelie Richter analyzes the details.
The EU energy ministers had to negotiate a controversial package solution yesterday. After Germany had pushed the other states ahead on e-fuels, the dispute over France’s wish to count nuclear energy towards the EU’s renewables targets came to a head yesterday. Immediately before the Council, the two camps thus met in two separate rounds.
France’s Energy Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher called a renewed meeting of her February nuclear coalition. Meanwhile, her counterparts gathered around her Austrian counterpart, Leonore Gewessler. Representatives from ten other countries – including Germany – came together under the slogan “renewable means renewable” to agree on a common counter-position for the negotiations.
In addition to industrial cooperation, France and its allies are primarily concerned with “mobilizing financial resources,” according to a joint results paper of the pro-nuclear 13. France’s state-owned EDF, in particular, is in urgent need of fresh billions.
However, Pannier-Runacher’s most important goal yesterday was to reach a preliminary decision for today’s trilogue, which is to seal the amendment of the Renewable Energy Directive (RED). Therefore, the general orientation on the gas market package was postponed from the morning to the afternoon. Attempts had been made in earlier drafts to regulate into the RED via the Gas Market Directive and thus create a basis for retroactively counting nuclear energy towards renewable targets in transport and industry.
Finally, the Council removed the nuclear paragraph from the general approach to the Gas Market Directive. “Low-carbon hydrogen is not recognized as renewable and the dubious bridge to RED is history,” rapporteur Jens Geier (SPD) commented on his LinkedIn profile.
Working out a solution to the nuclear dispute is up to the Permanent Representatives meeting today. From 4 pm, it then goes to the trilogue, where Parliament must approve the position. Rapporteur Markus Pieper (CDU) had expressed skepticism a few weeks ago. According to Pieper, quotas for low-carbon hydrogen from nuclear energy should at most be added on top of the targets for green hydrogen.
Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson signaled a concession on another level. The Commission understood that member states needed guidelines for the use of small modular reactors (SMRs) and EU-wide standards for them, she said in the evening press conference. The Commission would thus work with the nuclear industry and “deliver in this area.”
The general direction on the gas market package received a mixed reception on Tuesday. While the DIHK approved that gas network operators should initially also be able to build and operate hydrogen networks, operators expressed opposition to the Council’s position. The Council had advocated ownership separation of the hydrogen and gas networks at the distribution network level, the Association of Municipal Corporations (VKU) said. This would make it almost impossible for many municipal utilities to initiate an investment-safe transformation of the infrastructure, said CEO Ingbert Liebing.
Energy ministers also agreed to extend the EU’s voluntary gas savings target until March 2024. Introduced in August 2022, it would otherwise have expired on Friday under the previous emergency regulation. However, mandatory tightening up on reporting – such as sector-by-sector data on gas consumption – was blocked by member states yesterday.
EU countries are still expected to save 15 percent gas compared to a five-year reference period. The Parliamentary State Secretary Franziska Brantner, who attended the meeting on behalf of the German Federal Ministry of Economics, called this “Good and important.”
Until January, the states had still exceeded the target. But, compared to last fall, gas prices have fallen sharply, so the financial incentive to save has weakened. It is also questionable whether the next winter half-year will be as mild as the last one. Only recently, the Commission revealed that even the gas supply in the winter of 2024/25 could be at risk if Russia stops its deliveries and no gas is saved at all in the coming warm months.
Passenger cars and light commercial vehicles must be carbon-neutral from 2035. Whether cars that can be fueled exclusively with e-fuels will also count as such has been the subject of heated debate over the past four weeks, particularly at the insistence of German Transport Minister Volker Wissing. The German government was only able to approve the new rules on Tuesday after the Commission explained over the weekend how it intends to allow such “e-fuels only” vehicles to be registered even after 2035.
However, this statement had no effect on the legislative text that came up for a final vote today. To the new car fleets of car manufacturers thus applies:
In the statement, the Commission assured that it would first introduce, via an implementing act, a new vehicle category for “e-fuels only” vehicles within the type approval of the Euro 5 and Euro 6 regulations. This is to ensure that:
How these specifications are implemented is up to the automotive industry itself.
Subsequently, either through a delegated act or, should this fail, through the ordinary revision of the fleet regulation, it will be clarified how manufacturers can count this new category of vehicles towards their fleet targets.
Transport Minister Wissing welcomed the declaration and expressed his confidence that vehicles with combustion engines running on e-fuels can now still be newly registered after 2035. He said the Commission’s statement was an important signal to the market to build up production capacities for e-fuels because “broad demand for e-fuels is the fundamental prerequisite for climate-neutral fuels to become competitive.”
Jens Gieseke, Transport Policy Spokesman for the CDU/CSU group in the European Parliament, doubts, however, that it is actually the end of the internal combustion engine phase-out, as Wissing had called it. With the approval of the Council, Wissing had ensured that the ban on internal combustion vehicles would be confirmed by EU regulation. This was a “bitter defeat for the minister who had the claim to save the internal combustion engine.” Gieseke already advocated during the negotiations for the crediting of e-fuels for the fleet targets. “Both the Greens and Commissioner Timmermans will rub their hands and celebrate the end of the internal combustion engine,” the CDU politician said.
And indeed: Several Green politicians celebrated the “combustion engine phase-out.” Rasmus Andresen, the Spokesman for the German Greens in Parliament, called it a great success for a climate-friendly transport policy. However, he also criticized Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who should have used his authority to issue directives earlier to prevent the “negotiation chaos.” The climate policy spokesman for the Green Party, Michael Bloss, also defined the law as a clear end to internal combustion: “From 2035, only cars with zero tailpipe emissions may be registered.”
Liberal Dutchman Jan Huitema (Renew), who led negotiations on carbon fleet regulation for Parliament, also expressed skepticism that the German government and the Commission will succeed with their renegotiated supplementary declaration. “Any possible future proposals concerning the use of e-fuels will be thoroughly assessed, both on their content and their legal basis,” Huitema said. The background to this is whether the Commission has the authority to issue a delegated act for the law at all.
The automotive industry still reacted cautiously to the Commission’s statement on e-fuels. It had always called for a rapid ramp-up of the charging infrastructure in Europe in the event of a ban on internal combustion engines. VDA President Hildegard Müller described the compromise on the Alternative Fuel Infrastructure Regulation (AFIR) negotiated in the trilogue on Tuesday night as not enough. She said it falls well short of what is needed to achieve the ambitious e-mobility targets. “Drivers should be able to find a charging point every 40 kilometers along the EU’s most important transport axes – with the now specified 60 kilometers, the agreement is far from a consumer-friendly solution.” The increase in charging power to 1.3 kilowatts is a step in the right direction, Müller said. However, three kilowatts would have been necessary.
The European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA) also believes the compromise is insufficient. “A significant ‘infrastructure gap’ will continue to limit carbon reductions and the transition of the road transport sector to climate neutrality,” warned ACEA Director General Sigrid de Vries. She called for member states to urgently ensure that planning and approval procedures for charging points are accelerated, power grids are upgraded, and suitable space is available for truck charging.
The EU institutions have agreed on a new instrument that will allow Europe to respond more effectively to economic coercion attempts from non-EU countries like China. The EU Parliament, the EU Commission and the EU Council of Member States (the so-called trilogue) negotiated a political agreement on early Tuesday morning. The Anti-Coercion Instrument, ACI for short, is designed to allow the European Union to take countermeasures against countries that attempt to use economic dependencies to exert political pressure on one or more EU members. However, the instrument is only to be used as a last resort – when dialogue has failed to yield results.
Not all EU member states were so eager for ACI – some believe it could spark more disputes with Beijing. As a result, the EU Council pulled some teeth out of the instrument during the negotiations. The competence to decide whether a measure of a non-EU country constitutes a case of economic coercion thus lies fully with the member states and has to be decided by a qualified majority. The EU Council also removed an emergency clause.
However, in order to prevent stalling tactics, the negotiators have imposed a fixed timeframe on the use of the ACI. The instrument provides for the following procedure:
Countermeasures against the respective country may include, but are not limited to:
A final trilogue meeting should be a mere formality to finalize the text, according to Bernd Lange, Chairman of the Committee on Trade in the European Parliament, on Tuesday. He wants this to happen soon. After that, the EU Council and the EU Parliament still have to agree before the instrument can enter into force. According to Lange, this is supposed to happen before the summer break. The SPD European politician expressed his satisfaction with the trilogue agreement: “The instrument is not a water pistol, but a real firearm.”
The latest prime example of economic coercion from China had lent even more urgency to the EU process: In late 2021, Beijing imposed a de facto trade embargo on the EU state of Lithuania after the Baltic country allowed Taiwan to open a liaison office called the “Taiwan Office” in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius.
Angered by this, Beijing even purged Lithuania entirely from the customs register for a few days in December 2021. Economic exchange between Lithuania and China has been at a low since then. Beijing’s embargo is moving in a trade policy gray area of tariff restrictions and other bullying against Lithuanian companies.
China denies an official trade ban, which is why Brussels recently took the matter to the World Trade Organization and arranged for an arbitration tribunal to be set up in Geneva. It was set up at the end of January, but according to the WTO, the panel has not yet been composed. WTO arbitration courts take their time – decisions can take up to a year and a half.
Whether the ACI could now help Lithuania more quickly remained open after the trilogue agreement. A Commission spokeswoman said the instrument would only be applied to future cases. Committee chairman Lange, however, said that this remained to be seen. Lange saw a potential application of the instrument in the case of ASML, a Dutch manufacturer of semiconductor machinery.
China’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Tan Jian, has already warned of a deterioration in bilateral relations if the EU country were to actually implement the planned export ban on ASML. “This will not be without consequence. I will not speculate on countermeasures, but China will not take this lightly,” Tan said. A possible economic retaliation from Beijing against the Netherlands could theoretically be responded to with the new instrument in the future.
What the EU Commission proposed last year with its European Media Freedom Act has already drawn some criticism. And there was also censure at the Culture and Education Committee, CULT. “We make very strong regulations for the internal market, but we don’t say a word about transnational structures. Regarding media concentration, for example, the focus is always on the national market,” criticized rapporteur Sabine Verheyen (CDU) on Tuesday. This would also include online platforms as media aggregators.
According to Petra Kammerevert (SPD), the European Media Freedom Act needs “significant improvement.” She welcomes that the protection of sources is to be codified throughout Europe. But the proposed regulations are insufficient. She also welcomes the planned transparency regulations for media links. Like Verheyen, Kammerevert also sees problems with the legal basis chosen by the Commission, the internal market article 114 TFEU: “We’re not just talking about a commodity here, but also a cultural asset.”
She doubts that the text is suitable for solving the problems that actually exist in some member states. That the head of the Hungarian media supervisory authority found the legislative proposal to be “quite wonderful” makes her doubt its effectiveness.
The text states that the goal is state neutrality, but, at the same time, the proposed solution is wrong, says Kammerevert: “Creating a media supervisory authority at the European level that then has to work completely dependent on the Commission is absolutely unacceptable to me because it clearly contradicts the requirement of state neutrality.” Questions would also arise in other areas, such as whether the EU Commission could and should actually decide whether public broadcasting in Europe is adequately financed.
Irena Joveva, Slovenian Deputy for Renew, was much more positive. It is much easier to defend existing freedoms than to restore those that have already been damaged. The proposed regulation is a gentle way to promote better cooperation between media regulators in Europe and provide another safety net. She said she wanted to make the planned committee of media regulators not only more remote from the state but also provide it with more powers. The committee should thus also be equipped with appropriate expertise – from journalists, associations or other experts. Joveva sees the need for more capabilities in one area in particular: “Transparency is one of the most important factors, which is why I would extend it to all state agencies, including state-owned companies.”
The Spanish Green Diana Riba i Giner stressed that in the case of the Greens/EFA Group, the way of the regulation would be the right one. She calls for a clear definition of the concept of media to be protected by the EMFA. Only in this way would enforcement be possible. This term should go beyond traditional media and also include online media forms. Where exactly the boundaries are drawn, what is to be regulated as media, and what is to be regulated as a media environment, is disputed. Alexis Georgoulis of the Left Party announced that his group wanted to table amendments, especially on the protection of journalists, transparency of media ownership, and state influence.
The LIBE Committee is working on certain parts of the Media Freedom Act dossier, especially concerning better protection of journalists, for example, from unlawful state surveillance measures. Ramona Strugariu, the Romanian Renew politician in charge there, reported that the Civil Liberties Committee had its first rapporteur meeting on Monday.
In the LIBE, time pressure seems particularly high: Because the Parliament is now in the last year of the legislative period, extensive amendments could automatically mean that the EMFA can no longer be negotiated before the election. The vote on the LIBE portions of the dossier is scheduled for the end of June. In response, Sabine Verheyen cautioned her colleagues, “If you want to be considered in our work with your opinion, the end of June might be too late.” Under certain circumstances, the trilogue could begin in November at the earliest.
For the Internal Market Committee IMCO, which is also partly responsible, French MEP Geoffrey Didier (EPP) emphasized that the relationship to national media regulation practice must be looked at very closely. The objectives of the EMFA are laudable, but harmonization at any price is not the goal. For IMCO, it is important that digital players such as search engines are included. In addition, the separation into audiovisual services and the press are still relevant to take account of the special features, he said. IMCO plans to hold its second shadow rapporteur meeting in May to reach a result in June.
The parliamentarians’ time pressure has a second, unspoken background – in addition to the fact that the EP will be newly elected in May of next year: From July 2024, first Hungary and then Poland will successively hold the Council Presidency – two of the countries actually targeted by European Media Freedom.
She is one of the most important thought leaders on private law and digitization. The European Union has already passed some of her proposals into law. And she was Co-Chair of the German Data Ethics Commission. But before that, Christiane Wendehorst wasn’t even sure she should study law.
As a teenager, she dreamed of one day developing the energy supply of the future. She often lost herself in musings for hours. “But jobs in the natural sciences were scarce back then,” says Wendehorst, who grew up in the 1970s. And then, there was the financial insecurity; her parents couldn’t support her. That is why she studied law. “I knew there was job security.” Today, Wendehorst is a Professor of Civil Law at the University of Vienna and Academic Director at the European Law Institute. One of her areas of focus: Data law.
During her legal clerkship, Wendehorst wrote legal opinions on foreign law as a research assistant at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich on a piecework basis – often from five until almost midnight, without the Internet, she says. “Actually, unimaginable by now.” One day she deals with Iranian divorce law, another with Russian inheritance law. The experience of dealing with a wide variety of legal environments still helps her in her work today.
In 2015, Christiane Wendehorst experiences the key moment leading her to digital law: A colleague asks her to give a lecture on liability and the Internet of Things. Wendehorst agrees, even though it is not exactly her area of expertise. During her research, she discovers that there is hardly anything useful on the subject in the legal literature. But she masters the lecture, she gets enthusiastic feedback – and from then on, she is on fire for digital law. Her five-component model of a device on the Internet of Things and its implications for the law of sale have now become European law.
What must data protection provide to be good data protection? The answer has many dimensions: “Right now, collecting data is often the only solution we have to the problems of our world,” says the professor. Data yields opportunities for action – and the more accurate they are, the more effective the actions. That became clear during the Covid pandemic, she says.
Thus, data is only bad if you do bad things with it. Wendehorst has an example ready: just imagine a relative dies abroad, and the only way to get there is by plane. What if the airlines know about the situation and take advantage of it by offering flights only at exorbitant prices? Wendehorst calls this overreaching and thinks practices like this should be banned.
Returning to the question: “Good data protection is risk-based. If there is a small risk of abuse, then there should be small hurdles,” the professor sums up. “And if the risk is great, then the hurdles should be correspondingly great.” Martin Hogger
Should hydrogen from nuclear power be counted towards the renewables targets? That’s exactly what France and some other countries demanded. But yesterday, the energy ministers rejected this idea and removed the project from the general orientation of the gas market directive. In return, the Commission signaled a concession on another level regarding nuclear power. Read more in the feature by Manuel Berkel.
Passenger cars and light commercial vehicles must be carbon-neutral from 2035. Yesterday, there was actually a decision: Germany abandoned its blockade position in the Council of Ministers in return for a compromise on e-fuels. Lukas Scheid reports on how the Commission intends to ensure that combustion vehicles can only be refueled with e-fuels.
What’s next for the EU’s China policy? Ursula von der Leyen will spell this out tomorrow in a keynote speech. Informed sources say that she wants to rebalance the relationship with Beijing. Not a US-style decoupling but a targeted reduction of dependencies on critical technologies and raw materials. Europe had better not rely on the goodwill of President Xi Jinping. The Commission President is also likely to announce concrete measures. The Commission is working on a proposal to make investments by European companies in security-relevant sectors in third countries subject to approval.
Yesterday, negotiators from the European Parliament and the Council agreed on a different tool: the anti-coercion instrument is intended to protect EU states from coercive economic measures more effectively, especially those taken by Beijing. Amelie Richter analyzes the details.
The EU energy ministers had to negotiate a controversial package solution yesterday. After Germany had pushed the other states ahead on e-fuels, the dispute over France’s wish to count nuclear energy towards the EU’s renewables targets came to a head yesterday. Immediately before the Council, the two camps thus met in two separate rounds.
France’s Energy Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher called a renewed meeting of her February nuclear coalition. Meanwhile, her counterparts gathered around her Austrian counterpart, Leonore Gewessler. Representatives from ten other countries – including Germany – came together under the slogan “renewable means renewable” to agree on a common counter-position for the negotiations.
In addition to industrial cooperation, France and its allies are primarily concerned with “mobilizing financial resources,” according to a joint results paper of the pro-nuclear 13. France’s state-owned EDF, in particular, is in urgent need of fresh billions.
However, Pannier-Runacher’s most important goal yesterday was to reach a preliminary decision for today’s trilogue, which is to seal the amendment of the Renewable Energy Directive (RED). Therefore, the general orientation on the gas market package was postponed from the morning to the afternoon. Attempts had been made in earlier drafts to regulate into the RED via the Gas Market Directive and thus create a basis for retroactively counting nuclear energy towards renewable targets in transport and industry.
Finally, the Council removed the nuclear paragraph from the general approach to the Gas Market Directive. “Low-carbon hydrogen is not recognized as renewable and the dubious bridge to RED is history,” rapporteur Jens Geier (SPD) commented on his LinkedIn profile.
Working out a solution to the nuclear dispute is up to the Permanent Representatives meeting today. From 4 pm, it then goes to the trilogue, where Parliament must approve the position. Rapporteur Markus Pieper (CDU) had expressed skepticism a few weeks ago. According to Pieper, quotas for low-carbon hydrogen from nuclear energy should at most be added on top of the targets for green hydrogen.
Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson signaled a concession on another level. The Commission understood that member states needed guidelines for the use of small modular reactors (SMRs) and EU-wide standards for them, she said in the evening press conference. The Commission would thus work with the nuclear industry and “deliver in this area.”
The general direction on the gas market package received a mixed reception on Tuesday. While the DIHK approved that gas network operators should initially also be able to build and operate hydrogen networks, operators expressed opposition to the Council’s position. The Council had advocated ownership separation of the hydrogen and gas networks at the distribution network level, the Association of Municipal Corporations (VKU) said. This would make it almost impossible for many municipal utilities to initiate an investment-safe transformation of the infrastructure, said CEO Ingbert Liebing.
Energy ministers also agreed to extend the EU’s voluntary gas savings target until March 2024. Introduced in August 2022, it would otherwise have expired on Friday under the previous emergency regulation. However, mandatory tightening up on reporting – such as sector-by-sector data on gas consumption – was blocked by member states yesterday.
EU countries are still expected to save 15 percent gas compared to a five-year reference period. The Parliamentary State Secretary Franziska Brantner, who attended the meeting on behalf of the German Federal Ministry of Economics, called this “Good and important.”
Until January, the states had still exceeded the target. But, compared to last fall, gas prices have fallen sharply, so the financial incentive to save has weakened. It is also questionable whether the next winter half-year will be as mild as the last one. Only recently, the Commission revealed that even the gas supply in the winter of 2024/25 could be at risk if Russia stops its deliveries and no gas is saved at all in the coming warm months.
Passenger cars and light commercial vehicles must be carbon-neutral from 2035. Whether cars that can be fueled exclusively with e-fuels will also count as such has been the subject of heated debate over the past four weeks, particularly at the insistence of German Transport Minister Volker Wissing. The German government was only able to approve the new rules on Tuesday after the Commission explained over the weekend how it intends to allow such “e-fuels only” vehicles to be registered even after 2035.
However, this statement had no effect on the legislative text that came up for a final vote today. To the new car fleets of car manufacturers thus applies:
In the statement, the Commission assured that it would first introduce, via an implementing act, a new vehicle category for “e-fuels only” vehicles within the type approval of the Euro 5 and Euro 6 regulations. This is to ensure that:
How these specifications are implemented is up to the automotive industry itself.
Subsequently, either through a delegated act or, should this fail, through the ordinary revision of the fleet regulation, it will be clarified how manufacturers can count this new category of vehicles towards their fleet targets.
Transport Minister Wissing welcomed the declaration and expressed his confidence that vehicles with combustion engines running on e-fuels can now still be newly registered after 2035. He said the Commission’s statement was an important signal to the market to build up production capacities for e-fuels because “broad demand for e-fuels is the fundamental prerequisite for climate-neutral fuels to become competitive.”
Jens Gieseke, Transport Policy Spokesman for the CDU/CSU group in the European Parliament, doubts, however, that it is actually the end of the internal combustion engine phase-out, as Wissing had called it. With the approval of the Council, Wissing had ensured that the ban on internal combustion vehicles would be confirmed by EU regulation. This was a “bitter defeat for the minister who had the claim to save the internal combustion engine.” Gieseke already advocated during the negotiations for the crediting of e-fuels for the fleet targets. “Both the Greens and Commissioner Timmermans will rub their hands and celebrate the end of the internal combustion engine,” the CDU politician said.
And indeed: Several Green politicians celebrated the “combustion engine phase-out.” Rasmus Andresen, the Spokesman for the German Greens in Parliament, called it a great success for a climate-friendly transport policy. However, he also criticized Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who should have used his authority to issue directives earlier to prevent the “negotiation chaos.” The climate policy spokesman for the Green Party, Michael Bloss, also defined the law as a clear end to internal combustion: “From 2035, only cars with zero tailpipe emissions may be registered.”
Liberal Dutchman Jan Huitema (Renew), who led negotiations on carbon fleet regulation for Parliament, also expressed skepticism that the German government and the Commission will succeed with their renegotiated supplementary declaration. “Any possible future proposals concerning the use of e-fuels will be thoroughly assessed, both on their content and their legal basis,” Huitema said. The background to this is whether the Commission has the authority to issue a delegated act for the law at all.
The automotive industry still reacted cautiously to the Commission’s statement on e-fuels. It had always called for a rapid ramp-up of the charging infrastructure in Europe in the event of a ban on internal combustion engines. VDA President Hildegard Müller described the compromise on the Alternative Fuel Infrastructure Regulation (AFIR) negotiated in the trilogue on Tuesday night as not enough. She said it falls well short of what is needed to achieve the ambitious e-mobility targets. “Drivers should be able to find a charging point every 40 kilometers along the EU’s most important transport axes – with the now specified 60 kilometers, the agreement is far from a consumer-friendly solution.” The increase in charging power to 1.3 kilowatts is a step in the right direction, Müller said. However, three kilowatts would have been necessary.
The European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA) also believes the compromise is insufficient. “A significant ‘infrastructure gap’ will continue to limit carbon reductions and the transition of the road transport sector to climate neutrality,” warned ACEA Director General Sigrid de Vries. She called for member states to urgently ensure that planning and approval procedures for charging points are accelerated, power grids are upgraded, and suitable space is available for truck charging.
The EU institutions have agreed on a new instrument that will allow Europe to respond more effectively to economic coercion attempts from non-EU countries like China. The EU Parliament, the EU Commission and the EU Council of Member States (the so-called trilogue) negotiated a political agreement on early Tuesday morning. The Anti-Coercion Instrument, ACI for short, is designed to allow the European Union to take countermeasures against countries that attempt to use economic dependencies to exert political pressure on one or more EU members. However, the instrument is only to be used as a last resort – when dialogue has failed to yield results.
Not all EU member states were so eager for ACI – some believe it could spark more disputes with Beijing. As a result, the EU Council pulled some teeth out of the instrument during the negotiations. The competence to decide whether a measure of a non-EU country constitutes a case of economic coercion thus lies fully with the member states and has to be decided by a qualified majority. The EU Council also removed an emergency clause.
However, in order to prevent stalling tactics, the negotiators have imposed a fixed timeframe on the use of the ACI. The instrument provides for the following procedure:
Countermeasures against the respective country may include, but are not limited to:
A final trilogue meeting should be a mere formality to finalize the text, according to Bernd Lange, Chairman of the Committee on Trade in the European Parliament, on Tuesday. He wants this to happen soon. After that, the EU Council and the EU Parliament still have to agree before the instrument can enter into force. According to Lange, this is supposed to happen before the summer break. The SPD European politician expressed his satisfaction with the trilogue agreement: “The instrument is not a water pistol, but a real firearm.”
The latest prime example of economic coercion from China had lent even more urgency to the EU process: In late 2021, Beijing imposed a de facto trade embargo on the EU state of Lithuania after the Baltic country allowed Taiwan to open a liaison office called the “Taiwan Office” in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius.
Angered by this, Beijing even purged Lithuania entirely from the customs register for a few days in December 2021. Economic exchange between Lithuania and China has been at a low since then. Beijing’s embargo is moving in a trade policy gray area of tariff restrictions and other bullying against Lithuanian companies.
China denies an official trade ban, which is why Brussels recently took the matter to the World Trade Organization and arranged for an arbitration tribunal to be set up in Geneva. It was set up at the end of January, but according to the WTO, the panel has not yet been composed. WTO arbitration courts take their time – decisions can take up to a year and a half.
Whether the ACI could now help Lithuania more quickly remained open after the trilogue agreement. A Commission spokeswoman said the instrument would only be applied to future cases. Committee chairman Lange, however, said that this remained to be seen. Lange saw a potential application of the instrument in the case of ASML, a Dutch manufacturer of semiconductor machinery.
China’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Tan Jian, has already warned of a deterioration in bilateral relations if the EU country were to actually implement the planned export ban on ASML. “This will not be without consequence. I will not speculate on countermeasures, but China will not take this lightly,” Tan said. A possible economic retaliation from Beijing against the Netherlands could theoretically be responded to with the new instrument in the future.
What the EU Commission proposed last year with its European Media Freedom Act has already drawn some criticism. And there was also censure at the Culture and Education Committee, CULT. “We make very strong regulations for the internal market, but we don’t say a word about transnational structures. Regarding media concentration, for example, the focus is always on the national market,” criticized rapporteur Sabine Verheyen (CDU) on Tuesday. This would also include online platforms as media aggregators.
According to Petra Kammerevert (SPD), the European Media Freedom Act needs “significant improvement.” She welcomes that the protection of sources is to be codified throughout Europe. But the proposed regulations are insufficient. She also welcomes the planned transparency regulations for media links. Like Verheyen, Kammerevert also sees problems with the legal basis chosen by the Commission, the internal market article 114 TFEU: “We’re not just talking about a commodity here, but also a cultural asset.”
She doubts that the text is suitable for solving the problems that actually exist in some member states. That the head of the Hungarian media supervisory authority found the legislative proposal to be “quite wonderful” makes her doubt its effectiveness.
The text states that the goal is state neutrality, but, at the same time, the proposed solution is wrong, says Kammerevert: “Creating a media supervisory authority at the European level that then has to work completely dependent on the Commission is absolutely unacceptable to me because it clearly contradicts the requirement of state neutrality.” Questions would also arise in other areas, such as whether the EU Commission could and should actually decide whether public broadcasting in Europe is adequately financed.
Irena Joveva, Slovenian Deputy for Renew, was much more positive. It is much easier to defend existing freedoms than to restore those that have already been damaged. The proposed regulation is a gentle way to promote better cooperation between media regulators in Europe and provide another safety net. She said she wanted to make the planned committee of media regulators not only more remote from the state but also provide it with more powers. The committee should thus also be equipped with appropriate expertise – from journalists, associations or other experts. Joveva sees the need for more capabilities in one area in particular: “Transparency is one of the most important factors, which is why I would extend it to all state agencies, including state-owned companies.”
The Spanish Green Diana Riba i Giner stressed that in the case of the Greens/EFA Group, the way of the regulation would be the right one. She calls for a clear definition of the concept of media to be protected by the EMFA. Only in this way would enforcement be possible. This term should go beyond traditional media and also include online media forms. Where exactly the boundaries are drawn, what is to be regulated as media, and what is to be regulated as a media environment, is disputed. Alexis Georgoulis of the Left Party announced that his group wanted to table amendments, especially on the protection of journalists, transparency of media ownership, and state influence.
The LIBE Committee is working on certain parts of the Media Freedom Act dossier, especially concerning better protection of journalists, for example, from unlawful state surveillance measures. Ramona Strugariu, the Romanian Renew politician in charge there, reported that the Civil Liberties Committee had its first rapporteur meeting on Monday.
In the LIBE, time pressure seems particularly high: Because the Parliament is now in the last year of the legislative period, extensive amendments could automatically mean that the EMFA can no longer be negotiated before the election. The vote on the LIBE portions of the dossier is scheduled for the end of June. In response, Sabine Verheyen cautioned her colleagues, “If you want to be considered in our work with your opinion, the end of June might be too late.” Under certain circumstances, the trilogue could begin in November at the earliest.
For the Internal Market Committee IMCO, which is also partly responsible, French MEP Geoffrey Didier (EPP) emphasized that the relationship to national media regulation practice must be looked at very closely. The objectives of the EMFA are laudable, but harmonization at any price is not the goal. For IMCO, it is important that digital players such as search engines are included. In addition, the separation into audiovisual services and the press are still relevant to take account of the special features, he said. IMCO plans to hold its second shadow rapporteur meeting in May to reach a result in June.
The parliamentarians’ time pressure has a second, unspoken background – in addition to the fact that the EP will be newly elected in May of next year: From July 2024, first Hungary and then Poland will successively hold the Council Presidency – two of the countries actually targeted by European Media Freedom.
She is one of the most important thought leaders on private law and digitization. The European Union has already passed some of her proposals into law. And she was Co-Chair of the German Data Ethics Commission. But before that, Christiane Wendehorst wasn’t even sure she should study law.
As a teenager, she dreamed of one day developing the energy supply of the future. She often lost herself in musings for hours. “But jobs in the natural sciences were scarce back then,” says Wendehorst, who grew up in the 1970s. And then, there was the financial insecurity; her parents couldn’t support her. That is why she studied law. “I knew there was job security.” Today, Wendehorst is a Professor of Civil Law at the University of Vienna and Academic Director at the European Law Institute. One of her areas of focus: Data law.
During her legal clerkship, Wendehorst wrote legal opinions on foreign law as a research assistant at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich on a piecework basis – often from five until almost midnight, without the Internet, she says. “Actually, unimaginable by now.” One day she deals with Iranian divorce law, another with Russian inheritance law. The experience of dealing with a wide variety of legal environments still helps her in her work today.
In 2015, Christiane Wendehorst experiences the key moment leading her to digital law: A colleague asks her to give a lecture on liability and the Internet of Things. Wendehorst agrees, even though it is not exactly her area of expertise. During her research, she discovers that there is hardly anything useful on the subject in the legal literature. But she masters the lecture, she gets enthusiastic feedback – and from then on, she is on fire for digital law. Her five-component model of a device on the Internet of Things and its implications for the law of sale have now become European law.
What must data protection provide to be good data protection? The answer has many dimensions: “Right now, collecting data is often the only solution we have to the problems of our world,” says the professor. Data yields opportunities for action – and the more accurate they are, the more effective the actions. That became clear during the Covid pandemic, she says.
Thus, data is only bad if you do bad things with it. Wendehorst has an example ready: just imagine a relative dies abroad, and the only way to get there is by plane. What if the airlines know about the situation and take advantage of it by offering flights only at exorbitant prices? Wendehorst calls this overreaching and thinks practices like this should be banned.
Returning to the question: “Good data protection is risk-based. If there is a small risk of abuse, then there should be small hurdles,” the professor sums up. “And if the risk is great, then the hurdles should be correspondingly great.” Martin Hogger
