A wave of support for health initiatives washed over the EU following COVID-19. Citizens’ recommendations formed in the Conference of the Future of Europe (CoFoE), which has now entered its final phase, are an attempt to consolidate this momentum.
Despite the implementation of direct democracy instruments such as the European Citizens Initiative (ECI), the EU still suffers from a lack of closeness between citizens and policy-makers. The aim of the CoFoE is to change this.
Originally proposed by French President Emmanuel Macron, who saw Brexit as the symbol of Europe’s crisis “which has failed to respond to its peoples’ needs for protection from the major shocks of the modern world”, the Europeans involved in CoFoE have given their recommendations.
The previous weekend was the first time the recommendations were debated – first by the working groups and then by the Conference Plenary.
It emerged that participants support possible treaty change to share competencies on health if that is what is necessary to turn their recommendations into reality — which it very well could be.
“To achieve that [the recommendations], citizens feel that there may be a need for health to be a shared competence between member states and the EU, even if that would entail a treaty change,” said Maroš Šefčovič, Vice-President of the European Commission and chair of the working group on health.
“I shared with my group my experience on the legal and political complexities of a treaty change, and also the extended timeframe, which such a process would require,” he added.
His warnings, however, did not discourage Nicolas Moravek from the Czech Republic and the citizens’ spokesperson in the working group on health while presenting their proposals at the Conference Plenary.
“We hear that it’s not possible but the citizens want it, [so] we have to at least try,” Moravek said.
This suggestion has surfaced prior to the CoFoE, when previous German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and group leader of the European People’s Party (EPP), Manfred Weber, said that treaty change could be necessary in order to give the EU the power to deal with future pandemics.
First of all, opening up treaty negotiations is like opening Pandora’s box – and according to Šefčovič, the EU is still recovering after the last treaty change.
Secondly, member states are keeping their competencies close.
As is happening with the current interinstitutional negotiations – trilogues – on the proposed regulation on serious cross-border threats to health, the Parliament wants to include the word “prevention” in article 5 regarding the Union’s preparedness and response plan. The member states are rejecting the suggestion because it would cross too far into their territory.
So all in all, starting negotiations to change treaties looks… unlikely. The only promise made came from Šefčovič who said that the Commission would follow up and “do our utmost” to include the citizens’ wishes in next year’s working programme.
The EU can still do a few things
The health recommendations have been shaped into six proposals, which were presented by Moravek at the Conference Plenary. The last of which was about a possible treaty change.
Even if that does not happen, there are things the EU could work on in the meantime, the participants said.
The first proposal about healthy food and lifestyle includes “access to healthy and affordable foodstuffs for all Europeans, how to achieve minimum standards for food quality and less antibiotics and other medicines.”
The EU is already active in this area, but recent recommendations from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) on which antimicrobials to use exclusively to treat humans in the fight against antimicrobial resistance (AMR) were not well received across the board.
The choice to not include the antimicrobial colistin used as a treatment for infections including pneumonia was particularly controversial: health professionals wrote a letter expressing their resistance to Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides, and MEPs in the European Parliament health committee (ENVI) slammed the recommendations. So it seems there is plenty of room for improvement.
The other proposals include strong healthcare through a European health care database, programmes for investment into healthcare, avoiding private actors profit too much from healthcare, and seeing healthcare in a broader context by having more understanding of the psychological area, more initiatives like the week for health and equal access to health care by seeing health care as a right.
Suggestions like equal access to and more investment into healthcare are being pushed by MEPs, who earlier this month approved their own-initiative report about making full use of cohesion policy to abolish health inequalities across the continent.
All this requires that EU institutions take these responsibilities seriously. Since they are already pessimistic about treaty change, it is imperative to take the other recommendations into account as best they can, in order to not undermine the credibility of the CoFoE process as a whole.
Back in January, Moravek expressed his concern at a Conference Plenary where he found that only “around 50% of politicians were really interested in what we were saying”.
Another CoFoE participant, Troels De Leon Petersen from Denmark, told EURACTIV that he “expected that politicians would have given suggestions on how to meet our requests, instead of making general statements or trying to put topics on their agendas, which have nothing to do with our recommendations.”
For now we will have to wait for the next plenary in Strasbourg on 8-9 April, where the working groups will present consolidated proposals. Next, all proposals will be delivered to the executive board before ending up in the hands of the presidents of the EU institutions on 9 May in Strasbourg.
Source: euractiv.com
