Committee on Legal Affairs Ordinary Meeting
Legend
Transcript markers
- text Sentence being played
- text Search result
- text Intervention cited by the link you opened
Click a sentence to play the video from that moment. Select text to quote it with the speaker, timestamp and link.
More options
Offset
Transcript offset
Export
Live capture
Versions of this video
Transcripts may differ slightly from one version to another.
JURI European Parliament
Follow its sittingsMaravillas Abadía Jover
A mí me gustaría que respondiéramos juntos a estas grandes preguntas.
En primer lugar, si los grandes proyectos estratégicos tendrán un papel central y cómo podrá garantizar la Comisión que el nuevo marco sea también sostenible para las pymes que forman parte de la cadena de valor. Y además, teniendo en cuenta que los semiconductores están estrechamente vinculados a tecnologías altamente innovadoras, pues también podríamos profundizar sobre cómo la Comisión pretende garantizar la protección de la propiedad intelectual y cuáles diría que son las principales líneas de actuación en esta materia. Y por supuesto, mostrar mi total disposición a trabajar de manera conjunta y constructiva tanto con los ponentes como con los ponentes alternativos, así como junto con la Comisión. Gracias.
Ilhan Kyuchyuk
Muchísimas gracias, dear rapporteur. And now I would like to give the floor to Mr. Werner. No, he's not here. Jonas Jötting from DG Connect.
Jonas Jötting
Honorable Chair, honorable members of the JURI Committee, thank you so much for inviting us to present the Chips Act 2 proposal, which has been adopted on the 3rd of June as part of a broader European technological sovereignty package. The Chips Act 2 is and builds on an existing framework, which is the Chips Act 1, which entered into force in September 2023. And many of you in the JURI Committee may remember it very well. The Chips Act 1, we analyzed in our evaluation, is a major success. It resulted into 53 billion of concrete investments in the Union.
We invested in our innovation capacities and built a first crisis monitoring framework. However, new challenges have emerged. The AI revolution has transformed the semiconductor market and demand for AI chips have skyrocketed. By 2030, we estimate that AI-related components are expected to account for more than 70% of the growth in the semiconductor market. Therefore, Europe must not only adopt these AI technologies, but also be able to manufacture them and design them in Europe.
We also similarly want to continue to invest in areas where we already excel. However, we analyzed that the EU is still dependent on third countries, especially in leading-edge manufacturing, leading-edge design, and in packaging.
And therefore, the Chips Act 2 is a sort of evolution of our current framework, and we want to adapt it to this AI future. We maintain the legal approach in terms of structure, and we also maintain the same legal basis, namely 114 internal market and 173-3 for the industrial policy. Regarding the three pillars of the Chips Act, we kind of, yeah, maintain the structure. And in the first pillar of the Chips Act, we want to continue to bolster in technological capacity, but with a bigger focus on industrialization of this innovation. And a big novelty, we want also to increase and stimulate demand-related measures.
Regarding to the second pillar, we continue to attract investments in semiconductor design and manufacturing capacities, but we want also to encompass better the entire value chain of the semiconductor ecosystem.
And finally, in the third pillar, we want to empower our industry to better monitor our supply chain and helping further coordinate between Commission, Member States, especially in times of crisis. So, the Chips Act 2.0 can be summarized into four key priorities. First one, improving our investment and competitiveness framework, including faster permits with a maximum duration of 12 months, a national one-stop shop, a renewed Chips Fund for startups and scale-ups, as well as the introduction of a semiconductor regions of excellence label. Secondly, demand measures. We want to increase chips made in Europe and bringing European manufacturers more closely to growth sectors such as AI, cloud services, and data centers.
And here, key actions include the creation of a demand forum and demand accelerators.
The proposal also provides new tools to better use public and private procurement to promote our European design companies. Thirdly, we still want to reinforce our supply-sided measures, including on the entire value chain, and notably with this novelty of strategic projects which aims to create a strong EU added value, and for instance in areas we identified such as advanced manufacturing, design, and packaging. Finally, we want to enhance our resilience, notably through the establishment of a business-to-business platform financed by the Commission, as well as stronger monitoring mechanisms and the possibility to use information requests, so-called in pre-crisis stages, to better anticipate and address potential disruptions in the future. So overall, we look forward for a great cooperation with the Parliament, both in the leading committee in ITRE, but also with you in JURI and IMCO, and looking forward to your questions. Thank you.
Ilhan Kyuchyuk
Excellent. Thank you very much, Mr. Jortink. And now I open the floor for the shadow rapporteurs, starting with Victor Negrescu for S&D.
Victor Negrescu
Thank you, Chair. Dear colleagues, first of all, I would like to thank the Commission and the rapporteur for their presentations. As shadow rapporteur, of course, I look forward to working constructively with the rapporteur and the other political groups to build a strong and balanced position for our committee.
So the starting point for us on the Chips 2.0 Act should be clear. Europe cannot claim technological sovereignty if it remains strategically dependent on others for the chips that power our economy, our AI systems, our critical infrastructure, and our defense. And we can simply look at data. Europe produces less than 10% of global semiconductors and remains almost entirely dependent on the US and Asia for the most advanced chips below 5 nanometers. So this is the reality.
Indeed, the first Chips Act was an important step forward. It helped establish competence centers, pilot lines, and new production facilities. But we expect Chips Act 2.0 to go further. From research to industrial deployment, from managing dependencies to reducing them, and from reacting to crisis to anticipating them. So from a legal affairs perspective, we see four key points to be reflected in our position.
First of all, we refer to the legal certainty and proportionality.
The Commission will have stronger tools to monitor supply chains, identify vulnerabilities and request information from companies. These tools can indeed be necessary, especially during crises, but the limits should be clear. So information requests should be necessary and proportionate. We need strong guarantees for trade secrets, intellectual property and commercially sensitive information. Companies must know what information can be requested, for what purpose, who can access it and how it can subsequently be used.
This continues on an important element of the work already done by our committee under the first Chips Act, where the Legal Affairs Committee specifically addressed legal clarity regarding confidential information and intellectual property. The second issue is about coherence, and this is very important for us. So the Chips Act 2.0 will interact with other pieces of regulation like the Cyber Resilience Act, the Cybersecurity Act and other European legislation. So we have to make sure that the Chips Act 2.0, where it will land and how will it operate under all those different regulatory frameworks. So we should avoid duplicating risk assessments, reporting requirements and compliance obligations.
We need greater security, but we have to make sure we do not create more complexity. The third element: for us, Europe needs geographical as well as technological resilience. So the proposal introduces strategic projects and semiconductor regions of excellence. For us, it's important to avoid a situation where we are only focusing on a couple of regions. So in order to build European technological sovereignty, we have to do that across Europe.
And we have emerging ecosystems in different places around Europe. And I will emphasize here Central and Eastern Europe, where we believe we have to make sure at European level that we are connecting those different ecosystems, but also support new innovation coming from the different regions of Europe. Last but not least, the fourth and last element: funding and implementation. It is clear that we need to ensure adequate resources, not come up with new legislation.
We have to be certain that in the next European budget, we have adequate funding for it, but also criteria that allow us to access that funding for everyone across Europe, but also in particular for SMEs, universities, research centers, and emerging ecosystems. So our objective in this discussion is that we want Europe not simply to secure access to the chips of the future, but we would like us to be in the position to design them, develop them, produce them in Europe, and of course, that will ensure our industrial future. In order to do that, we need to make sure this regulation is creating new opportunities, not new barriers. Thank you so much.
Ilhan Kyuchyuk
Thank you, Mr. Negrescu. And the next from the shadows is Mr. Bocheński on Chips Act 2.0? No, thank you. The next one then is Mr. Žalimas for Renew Europe.
Dainius Žalimas
Thank you. Thank you, Chair. First of all, I would like to express my gratitude to the rapporteur and to the representative of the Commission for this presentation. Certainly, I strongly support the objective of strengthening Europe's semiconductor ecosystem and reducing our strategic dependency. But I think we also need to learn from the Chips Act 1, or the first Chips Act.
Our objective should not simply be to replicate every part of the semiconductor value chain in Europe. We should identify where Europe already has strategic strengths and technological choke points, where we can develop new ones, and where our dependencies create genuine vulnerabilities. This also requires much better European coordination. Fragmented national strategies and subsidy competition will not deliver technological sovereignty. From the JURI perspective, this must go together with legal certainty, protection of intellectual property and trade secrets, and proportionate information sharing requirements.
So, my question probably to the representative of the commission is how will Chips Act 2 ensure that Europe investment is strategically targeted at areas where Europe can build genuine technological leverage, rather than simply subsidizing additional production capacity. Thank you.
Ilhan Kyuchyuk
Thank you, I think that was it from the members' side. Maravillas, can I give you back the floor in your capacity of rapporteur?
Maravillas Abadía Jover
Sí, muchísimas gracias. En primer lugar, tomo nota de lo indicado por los rapporteurs y les agradezco de nuevo sus puntos de vista. Comparto gran parte de sus objetivos: competitividad, financiación, simplificación.
Son oportunidades que tenemos en esta nueva propuesta. Estamos hablando de un informe de relevancia para la competitividad de la Unión Europea y volver a poner a la Unión Europea como un actor geopolítico relevante. Es el objetivo que tenemos: dar contenido a esta palabra mágica, la competitividad. De nuevo, mi compromiso con todos los shadows para sacar adelante este informe. No empezamos de cero.
El Chips Act 1.0 ha sentado las bases y ahora nos toca mejorarlo para que la innovación se traduzca en resultados concretos. Nada más, muchas gracias.
Ilhan Kyuchyuk
Thank you very much. Dear colleagues, we now turn to the presentation of the JURI draft opinion to the AFCO report on the institutional framework of the European Union and its interaction with national authorities in the application of the Union law, with particular reference to Article 19 of TFEU.
During our last meeting, we already held the first exchange of views where I underlined the importance of fully respecting the competences of our committee in this file and shared my determination to defend those competences, notably regarding the overview of the organization, the statute, and the functioning of the Court of Justice. Against the background, the draft opinion that is before you today seeks to address a number of elements in the draft report. In particular, I have sought to correct factual inaccuracies and misunderstandings, to remove elements which fall within JURI exclusive competence and simply have no place in the report, and where certain elements raise fundamental legal difficulties that could not simply be overlooked to remove them. I attempted to refocus the AFCO report on matters within its scope, notably towards the dialogue between judiciaries and respect for constitutional identity without rewriting the rules of the EU's highest court and in full respect for both our committee's remits.
I very much welcome constructive amendments from colleagues and look forward to our shared work on the opinion while remaining mindful of JURI's competences. As the Committee on Legal Affairs, we have particular responsibility to observe the applicable institutional rules and to defend their proper application. So I hope we will be all vigilant in that regard. And I would like to give the floor to the shadow rapporteurs, starting with EPP shadow rapporteur Mr. Vazquez. Are you speaking on behalf of Mr. Vavrikevič in this case?
Ilhan Kyuchyuk
No, actually not. Okay, okay. No, and then I'm moving to S&D, Krzysztof Śmiszek, the shadow for S&D.
Krzysztof Śmiszek
Thank you, Chair, and thank you for your work and for a serious opinion on a subject that is really of constitutional importance. As S&D, we warmly welcome this opinion. It, as you said, refocuses the text on what matters: the real role of the court, its procedures, the judicial network, and the recent reform grounded in sincere cooperation. And it removes what should never have been there: principles that do not exist in Union law, made-up academic criticism, and misreading of the Advocate General's role. It is for this Parliament to safeguard the integrity of its texts.
First, we must not treat as legitimate the rulings of courts whose independence has been discredited. The clearest example in this report is the Polish Constitutional Tribunal, a body both European courts in Strasbourg and in Luxembourg found unlawfully composed and part of what placed Poland under the Article 7 procedure. So we would amend any provision that relies on such rulings. Second, since the draft already relies on Article 2 and 19, it should also emphasize what they guarantee: independent courts, effective judicial protection and under the principle of non-regression, no lowering of the protection of judicial independence. Third, the report rightly stresses the preliminary reference under Article 267, the keystone of our judicial system.
We would strengthen it even further from a rule of law perspective.
It is for the member states to keep that avenue open and my country, Poland, shows why. Judges who applied Union law or referred questions to the court faced disciplinary proceedings and pressure.
Dialogue alone cannot replace protecting the judges who uphold Union law. So this is a strong and welcome opinion. Thank you once again for it. We hope with the additions we propose it sends the message our Union needs: that the rule of law is binding, enforceable, and worth defending. I'm looking forward to working on this file with you, colleagues.
Thank you so much.
Ilhan Kyuchyuk
Thank you, Mr. Śmiszek. The next one from the shadows is Mr. Boheński for ECR Group.
Tobiasz Bocheński
Thank you, thank you, Mr. Chair. For sure we can say that rapporteurs have made a lot of work, both of them, Mr. Weissmann-Sinavka and Mr. Kyuchyuk in JURI Committee. I believe that the text which was sent to us from AFCO is quite well and very, very deep and very interesting. The amendments proposed by our rapporteur, they reflect the way of thinking according to which lawmaking judicial interpretation made by court are intended to lead to constitutional evolution devoid of democratic will. They include some kind of semi-precedent system of law.
It's strange because as far as I remember, common law is not a part of EU legal system no more. This is a very pro-federalistic approach, in my opinion, what we can see in those amendments. I've dived into all of them with huge devotion. I saw only one which ECR can support. I have to say that.
It's some kind of approval of slow competence creep. So in my opinion, the draft report from AFCO should be left as it is. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Ilhan Kyuchyuk
Thank you, Mr. Bocheński. Do other members wish to speak? That is not the case. So, dear colleagues, I heard diverse opinions and I look forward to your amendments and as usual, I count on your constructive approach to work with me but also with AFCO committee to find the best possible interest for our own committee. And for me, it's obvious that we have to reiterate the main principles of rule of law and fundamental rights in this house and I think this is still the understanding of European Parliament.
The deadline for tabling amendments is the 5th of October, 5 o'clock, 5:00 PM, dear colleagues. Now we need a bit of technical break. Thank you.
Ask anything about this video — I analyse its transcript to answer.