The Civil Liberties Committee (LIBE) has endorsed a trilogue agreement on new rules to better protect the EU’s essential infrastructure. The new rules would establish harmonised minimum rules to ensure that different member states classify the same providers as essential, and risk assessments for essential infrastructure to boost its resilience in the face of disruptions and hazards. The scope would be expanded to eleven sectors in total, including energy, transport, banking, financial market infrastructures, health, drinking water, waste water, food, digital infrastructure and space. This topic come into the news recently with the Nord Stream gas pipelines sabotage in the Baltic Sea.

statement

vote

Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs

ŠIMEČKA, Michal (Renew, SK)

protection of the EU's essential infrastructure (T)

Resilience of critical entities: extracts from the vote and statement by Michal ŠIMEČKA (Renew, SK) - LIBE Committee

SOUNDBITE (English), Michal &#352;IME&#268;KA (Renew, SK), Rapporteur, The CIR directive is intended to make us all safer. That is greater protection and resilience for European companies, for our citizens, for our businesses all across Europe. So this legislation aims to strengthen the resilience of these critical entities that is, public or private entities against terrorist attacks, hybrid attacks against natural hazards and disasters. And what it intends to do is that member states will have better high quality preparedness plans, risk mitigation plans. And crucially, they will work together because in the next era, most of these threats will be pan-European because of the way our internal market is interconnected, the way our security is interconnected. We need to work together to raise the standards of resilience against these threats. And this is precisely what this what this directive is all about.

SOUNDBITE (English), Michal &#352;IME&#268;KA (Renew, SK), It protects from or is meant to protect and enhance the resilience against sabotage, hybrid attacks, physical all physical threats in the areas of energy, in the areas of transport, drinking water, in the areas of health, in the areas of food processing. So all of these things will be covered. All of these entities, all of these companies, all of these institutions will have to have much greater resilience plans. They will be checked. And the most important ones, which are of pan-European importance, will also be under a special supervisory regime. And those are the companies or those are the entities whose resilience is critical for the entire European Union. So, yes, for instance, when we're talking about pipelines, when we're talking about in this case, sabotage of Nordstream 2, it would exactly be the kind of case that directive once implemented should protect against

The most important thing it does, it establishes kind of a common level of how member states should be prepared and how they should protect their critical entities. Say a transport hub or a wholesale, you know, an important food processing center or a laboratory or anything have to do with energy. So you would now have a common standard for what member states should do to raise the level of preparedness and to raise the level of resilience. Next, it allows us to share information more quickly. If there is an incident in one member state or more member states which could affect citizens and businesses from across Europe, the information should be quickly and more widely shared, so that as a European Union, we are able to respond. And these are the kinds of things that in the long run, should make our societies and our economies more resilient.

SOUNDBITE (English), Michal &#352;IME&#268;KA (Renew, SK), Rapporteur, We don't know what Russians or anybody else could come up with in the future. What we can do is to make sure that we're prepared and that we have these resilience strategies and plans and infrastructure for sharing of information to have it ready. And this is what we aim to do with this with this directive.