The European Parliament, meeting in plenary session in Strasbourg, France, is today set to vote on a new draft law of the European Union that aims at establishing a European regulatory framework to register, evaluate and authorise some 30,000 chemicals in Europe.
The new law is referred to as the Reach Directive. Reach stands for Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation of Chemicals. The draft was presented by the European Commission two years ago, in October 2003. There are at the moment about 40 European directives governing the chemicals sector. On presenting the Reach proposal, the European Commission explained that there is a lack of adequate information on the environmental and health impact of most of the chemicals used in industry.
The legislative procedure in the EU requires that once the Commission adopts a draft law, the document is then passed on to the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers. It is up to these two institutions to decide whether to adopt the draft law or not.
In the case of the European Parliament, the draft law is first discussed at committee level. The Parliament has 20 committees, each one specialising in a particular topic. The committee prepares a report on the draft directive, which would then be put to vote. The report would normally contain amendments to the draft law. Once the committee approves the report with amendments, the same report is then presented to the European Parliament in plenary session where the 732 MEPs take a final vote. This procedure is called the First Reading of a draft law.
With regard to the draft Reach Directive, a number of parliamentary committees adopted their respective position on it.
Addressing a seminar for journalists at the European Parliament building in Brussels on November 9, Italian MEP Guido Sacconi (PES) announced that the largest political groups, namely the EPP-ED (Christian Democrats), PES (Socialists) and ALDE (Liberals) had come to a compromise on the Reach proposal. Mr Sacconi, who is the Parliament's main rapporteur on the Reach Directive, said that after long hours of debate, the main political groups agreed on a number of "concessions" regarding industry, health and the environment.
In the Parliament's compromise text, on which the 732 MEPs will be voting today, there are a number of amendments to the Commission's original draft. MEPs are asking for a simplified 18-month pre-registration phase with a further six months granted to downstream users of chemicals. Parliament also wants to introduce exposure and use categories (a risk-based approach) to determine the extent of safety data that companies would be required to submit to the future European chemicals agency for assessment. Parliament would like to drop the safety data requirements in the 10-100 tonne range of chemicals depending on appropriate justification of risk to be assessed by the European agency. MEPs want more flexible mandatory data sharing under the One Substance, One Registration proposal by allowing companies to register chemicals on their own.
Mr Sacconi told journalists the Parliament's amendments to the Reach proposal still ensure that the burden of proof on the effect of chemicals still rests with companies, although such proof depends on how substances are used and how people are likely to be exposed to them.
Following today's vote in the European Parliament, it would then be the turn of the Council of Ministers for Competitiveness to make the first reading of the Reach proposal. The Council is to meet on November 28-29. However, the new German government under Chancellor Angela Merkel has called for a pause to allow the new coalition to determine its position on the draft Reach directive. Germany has the largest chemical industry among the 25 EU member states. The German Minister for European Affairs, Jochen Riebel, told the Bundesrat that the Commission's proposal on the evaluation and registration of chemicals "is endangering the chemical industry's competitiveness". He called on the European Commission to revise the proposal making it less bureaucratic for businesses with chemicals being registered on a risk-based approach.
(Mr Attard attended the seminar, courtesy the European Parliament Information Office in Malta.)