Debate: Resilience of critical entities
Date: TUESDAY, 22 NOVEMBER 2022
Speaker: Michal Šimečka
Country: Italy
Language: EN

Before we vote, let me just give a brief overview of what has transpired in Europe while we have been working on this file, which also provides the strongest arguments for why the European Union needs a new piece of legislation to better protect its critical entities.  Right before the Commission rolled out its draft, the COVID pandemic broke out, infecting and killing millions of Europeans and disrupting our healthcare, our economy and our societies. Later, while we were negotiating this law, or this directive, Russia launched its brutal attack, its brutal aggression against Ukraine. And since then, the European Union has been facing an unprecedented increase in sabotage operations on its critical infrastructure – from the energy sector to transport services – and experiencing an increasing number of hybrid attacks on its public institutions.  And in the meantime, the climate crisis has been burning and flooding our continent from Greece to Portugal, Sweden to Italy. And all of these crises, all of these events have also served as a sort of compass for the co-legislators as they were finetuning this directive. Now more than ever, we must prove to our citizens that the European Union protects their lives, protects their jobs, their companies, the essential services that affect the daily lives of our citizens and, eventually, the entire European Union. Therefore, our ambition with this directive is to strengthen the ability of critical entities to cope with these risks to their operations, while improving the functioning of the internal market in these essential services.  There are 11 crucial sectors covered, and this directive addresses the various measures and requirements so that its implementation will adequately respond to both natural catastrophes and man-made attacks. I trust that our joint compass throughout this process has brought solid rules and established the cooperation, coordination and information flows among the Member States, the entities and the European Commission that will strengthen preparedness for these incidents, the response to these incidents and, eventually, their evaluations. Because resilience is not just about preventing a risk – a disaster can always occur; the crucial thing is how we cope with it and how we, as the European Union, bounce back from it.  Moreover, this is reflected in the legislation. There are entities which have a pan-European dimension because they operate simultaneously in several Member States, and a risk to their operations is therefore a risk for the single market as a whole. And this directive puts a special focus on these entities and on the cross-border cooperation of these entities, which are of particular European significance.  Finally, I would like to say that I’m delighted – and this is thanks to you, Madam Commissioner, and thanks to my colleagues, our shadow rapporteurs, our advisers in the European Parliament and our counterparts in the Council – that our mutual work has resulted in what I believe is the best possible legislation. It is a big step for the European Union, and I really hope that this Parliament will broadly support it by adopting our interinstitutional agreement later today.