- 2025-02-10 “E-000601/2025 Answer given by Mr Várhelyi on behalf of the European Commission For marketing authorisations authorised at centralised level, granted by the Commission, the product information for each medicinal product details the name and address of both manufacturer(s) of the active ingredient substance and manufacturer(s) responsible for batch release. This information is publicly available in the Union Register for medicinal products 1 . In view of further increasing the transparency of the supply chain of medicinal products, the proposal for a reform of the EU pharmaceutical legislation, currently being negotiated by the co-legislators, includes a dedicated provision aiming at reinforcing the traceability of any substance that is used, intended or expected to be present in a medicinal product at all stages of manufacturing and distribution, and identify any natural or legal person from whom these substances have been supplied 2 . 1 Union Register of medicinal products https://ec.europa.eu/health/documents/communityregister/html/index_en.htm 2 Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on the Union code relating to medicinal products for human use, and repealing Directive 2001/83/EC and Directive 2009/35/EC, COM/2023/192 final, Recital 89 and Article 58.”
Disclosure vs. confidentiality of pharma companies processes · Pharmaceuticals regulation in EU
- 2024-09-27 “E-001859/2024 Answer given by Ms Ivanova on behalf of the European Commission Freedom of movement of workers is a founding principle of the EU since its inception. In its judgment in Case C-415/93 1 , Bosman, the European Court of Justice ruled that the transfer system in football, as it was constituted, placed a restriction on the free movement of workers and was prohibited by Article 39 of the Treaty establishing the European Community (now Article 45 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union). Since then, EU footballers were given the right to a free transfer at the expiration of their contracts, if they transfer between EU clubs. In an unchanged legal context, the Commission does not envisage action which would reverse the effects of the Bosman ruling. Nevertheless, certain measures indirectly favouring national players may still be allowed. In football, one such measure, aimed at ensuring that clubs still have locally-trained players who will often be nationals of the Member State in which the club is located, is the ‘home-grown player rule’ 2 . The rule was assessed in Case C-680/21 3 , Royal Antwerp, where the European Court of Justice held that it could be justified if certain conditions are fulfilled as it may be necessary to pursue a legitimate objective in the public interest consisting in encouraging the recruitment and training of young professional football players. 1 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A61993CJ0415 2 ‘Home-grown player rule’ is a quota-based rule whereby minimum 8/25 players on the football squad of a club have to be so-called home-grown players, i.e. players who, regardless of their nationality, have been trained by their club or by another club in the same national league for at least 3 years between the ages of 15 and 21; out of these 8 players, 4 at least must have been trained by the club at issue. 3 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A62021CJ0680”
Broadcasting of sports events
- 2024-09-19 “E-001767/2024 Answer given by Mr Dombrovskis on behalf of the European Commission The Draghi report identifies four critical issues – innovation, climate, energy costs, and security – where Europe is not fully leveraging its size and scale due to fragmentation and a lack of coordination. The report also points to the large investment needed and to the need for simplification of regulatory frameworks at the EU, national and regional and local levels. Many recommendations of the Draghi report are already echoed in the political guidelines 1 and mission letters. This includes the focus on stress testing and simplifying EU rules, the forthcoming Clean Industrial Deal, the Competitiveness Coordination Tool and Fund or the Skills Portability Initiative, as well as the Savings and Investments Union and risk-absorbing measures to promote private investments in innovation and new technologies. Developing a more focused, simpler and more impactful new long-term EU budget will also be a key deliverable in the coming years. The work of the Commission on competitiveness will indeed draw on the report prepared by Mario Draghi, as well as the Single Market report by Enrico Letta. The Commission hopes that this work will mobilise the European Parliament, Member States and stakeholders so that the EU can make the advances needed to safeguard the EU’s prosperity and competitiveness. 1 https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/e6cd4328-673c-4e7a-8683f63ffb2cf648_en?filename=Political%20Guidelines%202024-2029_EN.pdf”
Climate efforts · EU political integration (free access)
- “Pirate sites streaming football is a skirt or a scourge and we need to tackle them. But what underlines this? Streaming in France 20 years ago we had streaming via Canal+, and for €20 a month you could see all the football online, and now you need four different subscriptions in order to really follow the football in France. So you need to pay upwards of €100 a month in France. If you really want to watch everything you want to see. And we know that the clubs that use these revenues for funding and so do the leagues. But that means that we also need to see others creating these broadcasts. And so in order to exist clubs. Are really trying to milk this revenue. And at the end it's the fans who pay. But who is truly benefiting from this? Well, it's the Pirates, of course. And we need to make sure that football is for youth and for the fans, and not just for money and profit. Thank you. Okay.”
Broadcasting of sports events
- “Well, Europe has invented everything the mobile phone, the car and the web. But today it is going to leave history. It is simply going to be a consumer of the innovation of others. 25 years that the government of my country has followed the recommendations. 25 years we had a trade. Excellent surplus. 25 years we were the fifth country in the world for industrial production. And today, with the 10th, our clean your deal is ideological. You want to move to 32% of electrification between now 2030, but you don't want to use nuclear energy, which is not mentioned in your deal. We cannot be competitive. But you still set goals. The carbon neutrality by 2050 with your deal, your our industry is not going to be clean. It's not going to be dirty either. It's going to disappear. And we'll be importing goods from polluting industries from the other side of the world.”
Energy (green transition)
- “I think the cars of tomorrow will be extremely connected and autonomous. We need to have a plan to sort that out, to regulate it and have common standards. But the real question is how these new cars will be driven. You are taking things in the wrong order. You're taking up electric vehicles without looking at how national systems are being ready or not, and whether they are efficient, whether they're affordable in forcing Europeans to move to electric. You're forcing them to paying for more expensive vehicles to do fewer kilometres than with an internal combustion engine with an electricity that costs more because of your ideology. So you're actually stifling progress. Real progress would have been different. We're now putting the cart before the horse. 100 years down the road, you're forcing French people to give up cars without an alternative. Progress has always allowed humans to live a better life. But now, because of you, it's a synonym of impoverishment and decline.”
Road transport environmental policy
- “The next speaker is Aleksandar Nikolic for one minute. Well, how hypocritical can we be about climate change? Because you are the main cause in my country, France. 50% of. Greenhouse gas emissions are linked to imports. We need to develop national markets and relocalize our industries to reduce imports. But Mrs. von der Leyen is doing the absolute opposite with the agreement in with New Zealand from 2023, which is just 20,000km from Paris to now, is going on to sign the agreement with Mercosur, which will sacrifice our farmers. But on top of that, it will drastically increase our imports and thus increase our greenhouse gas emissions. So that is the main cause of global warming. But you prefer to attack the drivers or deprive poor families of their gas boilers. We're paying more and more expensive electricity thanks to intermittent generating sources. So let's propose a solution. Mrs. von der Leyen, leave power.”
Trade relations with Mercosur
- “Since February 2020, electricity prices have gone up by 33%, according to Eurostat, 53.85% in France in the same period. So in 2020 it was €200 307 now, and it's going to go up even further in 2026. The families behind these figures, who are worried about surviving the winter and what they can afford without going into the red, can they heat up their houses without going into debt so we can support photovoltaic and wind? But Is what you're proposing would make people poorer, make the situation worse. You know very well that the nuclear power stations that produce clear, affordable, plentiful energy that will help. French help is what helps French people pay less than others. In Europe is not part of your solution, and you're turning a blind eye to the exorbitant costs that are hitting French people and the Europeans in the pocket. Adding all these panels and forms of renewables is all increasing the bill. So you're sacrificing people at the altar of this folly, environmental ideology. Look at the purchasing power of ordinary people, and don't count on us to betray them.”
EU approach to electricity market and prices
- “It's a good idea to have this exploration of the issue of recruitment of youth, but it would be even better if we weren't facilitating that recruitment because today, the police are toothless to combat this. I read your anti-drug strategy of 2021. Your main ways to combat drug trafficking was prevention and looking for causality.
Let me give you a clue. It's quite easy. Make lots of money, very quickly with no legal consequences for minors. And for prevention, I can guarantee you that there's no use telling drug traffickers that recruiting young people is wrong. They know it, and telling young people not to sell drugs is also useless.
Drug traffickers need to start fearing the state again, and young people need to realize that they face consequences. We need to drastically increase the margin or the leeway of our police officers. And if we continue to open borders so that people can bring in drugs, we're going to turn France and Europe into Mexico.”
EU policy on criminal justice
- “Now, I've been listening to you for the last hour. There's two priorities that you have clearly stated. The competitiveness of our companies and energy, the cost of energy and the energy transition. And new technologies. Now talking about new technologies, I, uh, looked at, uh, chat. Uh, and asked if Denmark was an example to follow. So we in, uh, France have a very different energy mix. Of course, we have a lot of nuclear. You stop nuclear and you are focusing on solar and wind. Now you emit ten times more greenhouse gases than France because you import more, uh, gas, because you also have coal still 13 to 14%, and you have electricity that is twice as expensive as French electricity. You have the most expensive electricity in Europe, similarly to Germany, that also decided to phase out nuclear. So new technologies, let me just say this is the information I've got from ChatGPT. I hope we'll have a European ChatGPT in the future, incidentally. But are you aware that your model is certainly not applicable to all of Europe, that you'll have to change your focus? Will you look at nuclear, which allows cheaper energy and less greenhouse gas emissions? Or will you stick to your ideology, which means that French and Europeans will end up paying for more and more expensive electricity? We've seen an 80% increase in electricity prices over the last 20 years, particularly in Denmark. Companies are penalised by these high energy prices. Or will you change? Because if you don't change it, you can end up emitting more greenhouse gases because you depend on coal and gas. Thank you.”
Nuclear energy
- “Colleagues. You don't need to feel useless. Just to sum up, you're just trying to explain to everyone, including all the citizens of France, that with AI will be much more effective. Uh, I'm sorry that there are 73% of people above 20 more, even under 20 people using the AI technology already. It's not exactly a scoop. If we'd done this five years ago by anticipating the explosion in the data center demand or the energy needs. This is a report that maybe we would all be using a mistrial. The French AI system instead of what we are using. But now you prefer to talk about Nuclear energy and the needs for that. You've not done anything useful. You're constantly off the mark. For example, last October, I asked someone from an investment if they were really looking into the future technology and they said, we don't actually have the money. We've got too much going on with the standards in Europe as it is and compliance. Nvidia, bolt and others, uh, will take us into 2028, 2029. But as we speak, you can already take an autonomous and self-driving taxi in China to go home. You want competitiveness, that's good, but stop messing around with standards and making our enterprises and businesses suffer with all the compliance costs.”
Artificial Intelligence
- “Commissioner. Mr. Séjourné, earlier in your introduction, you started by saying that we need to increase decarbonisation whilst preserving our competitiveness. Preserving what? When you talk about competitiveness, surely we should relaunch it with both French. Our country lacks competitiveness. There's deindustrialization. 25 years ago with the fifth world power. Now with the 10th, 25 years ago, we had a trade surplus. Now we have a trade deficit of 100 billion. And, you know, it's gone up by 40 billion. Now you want to decarbonise, but it's because you're destroying our industry. How can you compete when labour costs are high. Taxes are high when compared to, for example, Asian countries. Now everyone's already said this. You need to bring energy prices down, standards and so on. But if you want to reduce production costs and this hasn't been said, you also need to modernize French industry and European industry, but they're being penalized by your policies in 2023. South Korea had 1000 industrial robots per 1000 jobs, and that represents 31% of their GDP. Now in China, it's even higher. But in France, we have five times fewer industrial robots than China. And you know that it only accounts for 9% of GDP. And the robotization of our industry is vital. It's the only thing that can actually get us out of becoming a third world country. But what kind of figures are you using to relaunch our industry, apart from these beautiful intentions that you speak about and the lofty words that you use. Thank you.”
Energy (green transition)
- “Sorry. We have national governments and Barroso his commission, and we have a progressive agenda that has stood in the way of true progress. Mr. Nfo's report shows it's necessary and it mostly goes in the right direction on regulation and taxation. Many points have been tackled. The subject of technical giants have not been tackled. For example, Netflix, YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, Disney Prime which is over half of the traffic in the EU, and the benefits they benefit greatly from our infrastructure. But it's at the expense of European operators. I'd like to talk about submarine cables, which have disastrous. Results for the continent. 8,080% of data goes via sub submarine cables. We need to have the European satellite network developed to face up to Musk's Starlink network. Another subject which is key when we talk about sovereignty. I'm thinking about France because we have labor costs, which are high. It's the modernization of our industry. In 2023, for example, we had. A huge numbers of industrial robots in the China, the EU, the US, Japan and South Korea. And in France, they're just over 6000 of these. And in Germany, just over 28,000 of these robots. It's more industrial robots we have, the better we can have the industry maintained in our countries. And that's something that we need to work on more in terms of technological sovereignty and all notions. That it's down to the states and so that we don't have any misunderstandings here. I'll be tabling amendments and. It's about the the very survival of Europe as an important power.”
EU digital & tech sovereignty
- “You're travelling to the other side of the world to have your cocktail parties in Berlin, to talk about carbon taxes and renewable energy, which make energy even more expensive. I'd like to highlight something very specific. We've just learned that France has hit a new record this year. There's a new record for bankruptcies in France this year. It's the SMEs the most affected, increasing 13% over the past 12 months. It's quite simple. We're seeing the slow death of our businesses and our productive fabric and our future. We've produced a Europe of peace and prosperity, and now we are turning France into the Third World. As Mr. Baillon said, the the the Macron socialists, you've given our future to the Brussels technocrats. Now, the Cop 30 would just make the problem even worse. I hope between one of your cocktail parties, you think about the, the, the thousands of, uh, business leaders and workers, who you're sacrificing because we won't when we come to the election box.”
Climate efforts