News from our campaigns

Marrakesh Treaty

11 more EU countries (Belgium, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and the UK) have communicated their national measures of implementation of the Marrakesh Treaty Directive. This communication (and supposedly the transposition) is still missing for 5 countries so far: Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg and Portugal.

To our knowledge, among the 23 EU countries that have transposed the directive, only the following ones have opted for a scheme of compensation for rights-holders: Austria and Germany, as well as – only for audio-books – Denmark and Finland.

We have less visibility on which countries are imposing a requirement for authorised institutions to be on an agreed list, but France and Germany are for sure, and Italy and possibly Belgium are headed in that direction. We know for sure that the Czech Republic, Spain and Sweden have instead respected the Agreed Statement on Article 9.

Outside the EU: no new ratification or accession to the Treaty elsewhere in Europe.

European Accessibility Act

On the Council’s side, the COREPER (ambassador level) has approved in December the provisional political agreement reached on 8 November. At the European Parliament, the IMCO committee approved the agreement on 22 January. The plenary is expected to vote on it in March and the Council will also need to approve the agreement at ministerial level (no date set for that yet). The IMCO vote was probably the last one that could reserve some surprises, so the road toward the adoption of the EAA seems a formality now.

Silent Cars

Between December and January the European Commission ran a consultation on the Delegated Regulation that aims to ban the possibility for the vehicle driver to pause the Acoustic Vehicle Alerting System (AVAS) on silent cars, in accordance with UNECE Regulation No 138.01. We were very disappointed to see that the full pause switch prohibition is delayed for two further years, until 2023. We reacted against this delay in an EBU response to the consultation (PDF format) – also available in Word format.

Accessibility of Lifts

Based on the final report on the evaluation of the Lifts Directive, the European Commission finds that there is no reason to revise the directive. However, we were invited to provide them with a technical position paper explaining why we feel the revised EU standard for accessible lifts (CEN 81-70:2018) does not meet the test of universal design, before the Commission proceeds with the publication of its reference in the OJ.

In the perspective of the European Parliament elections (May 2019)

Our Board is expected to adopt on 2 February the EBU Statement on the European elections.