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Consultation Forum: New documents on voluntary agreements

The Consultation Forum on March 26, 2010 will, among other things, deal with „voluntary agreements under the Ecodesign Directive“. The EU Commission has now published new documents regarding this issue: A general working document on requirements with regard to the content and procedural aspects of voluntary agreements, and a new product group specific industry proposal for an agreement on imaging equipment (lot 4).

The general working document on voluntary agreements mainly contains an explanation of the criteria listed in Annex VIII of the Directive. In addition, the procedures for recognition of voluntary agreements proposed by industry and the monitoring process are presented.

Generally, the document deals with the mentioned issues rather briefly and the wording remains rather vague (the Commission “can” or “may”, the signatories “should”, in principle…). It seems that this document will not be the final state of the discussions since many of the previously discussed questions still remain open.

The draft proposal for a voluntary agreement on imaging equipment is a revised version of the first draft, which a group of enterprises had presented in October 2009. The Commission sees this document as a clear improvement compared to previous versions, but also points out that it includes some provisions which are within the competence of the Commission and therefore will have to be removed (e.g., means for recognising voluntary agreements).