The first meeting of the Council Working Party on Technical Harmonisation, held on 8 September in Brussels under the Spanish Presidency of the EU Council, discussed how to boost the role of the Member States in strengthening the European Standardisation System.
Representatives from the 27 Member States, the European Commission, the European standards bodies CEN-CENELEC and ETSI, the employers' organisation Europa Business Europe and the European association promoting the interests of SMEs in standardisation Small Business Standards (SBS) exchanged views on actions to be taken to encourage the participation of the various stakeholders in the European Standardisation System, and to ensure that the system remains relevant in the long term. The participants also expressed their views on the recent challenges facing the European Standardisation System.
One of the central themes of the discussion was the Advocate General's Opinion in case C-588/21, which could pose a major challenge to the international standardisation system. It was stressed that if the European Court of Justice were to follow its opinion, this would have a negative impact on the voluntary contributions of all stakeholders, would weaken the public-private partnership between the EU and the European Standards Organisations, and would detrimentally decouple the European standardisation process from the international standardisation system.
The European Commission underlined the important role of the High Level Forum on European Standardisation in hosting strategic discussions on standardisation priorities, both in terms of horizontal and sectoral issues. Its next meeting is scheduled for November 2023.
