European Commission Work Programme 2012: Internal market and services

For some reason Eur-Lex stubbornly renders the headline of the bibliographic notice in Danish, although the rest of the text is in English. Anyway, the Commission work programme 2012, available in 22 official EU languages, is a suitable read when we are transiting from one annus horribilis to the next. The English language version of the CWP (pdf):

Commission Work Programme 2012: Delivering European renewal; VOL. 1/2 Brussels, 15.11.2011 COM(2011) 777 final (11 pages)

The CWP 2012 offers a convenient overview of ongoing work and planned actions.


Planned actions

If the CWP is Volume 1/2, there should logically be a Volume 2/2, but I was unable to locate it on the legal portal Eur-Lex.

There is, however, an alternative route. If we navigate to the web page The Commission Work Programme, we can find both the CWP proper and an Annex (also in 22 languages). The latter turns out to be the more substantive:

ANNEX to the Commission Work Programme 2012; VOL. 2/2 Brussels, 15.11.2011 COM(2011) 777 final (45 pages)

This is the document for people more deeply interested in one or more areas of the Commission's work in the near future.

About half of the document (pages 2-23) is dedicted to the 129 legislative proposals and other actions planned by the Commission for 2012.

The paper is divided into policy areas, with brief descriptions of each action.


Internal market and services

In this blog post I am going to mention the actions regarding the internal market and services even more briefly:

78 Legislative proposal regarding the protection of investors: Amendment of the UCITS Directive as regards rules on UCITS depositary functions, on manager remuneration policy, and on administrative sanctions
79 Shadow banking communication
80 Legislative proposal on the protection of investors: PRIPs (precontractual disclosures of complex investment products
81 Follow-up to the Performance Check for services: Deepening the single market for services
82 Legislative proposal on collective rights management: Music rights – music online
83 Legislative review of single market and pension funds: Institutions for Occupational Retirement Provision (IORP)
84 Legislative proposal: Revision of the Insurance Mediation Directive (IMD)
85 Legislative proposal: Revision of the Community Trade Mark Regulation and of the Directive approximating national trade mark laws
86 Initiative on disclosure of non-financial information by companies
87 Communication about on-line gambling in the Internal Market
88 Enforcement of intellectual property rights – adaptation of the Directive 2004/48 known as IPRED
89 Legislative proposal: Securities Law Directive
90 Legislative proposal: Close-out netting
91 Digital Single Market: Initiative on notice and takedown procedures
92 Legislative proposal: Insurance Guarantee Schemes
93 Legislative proposal: Third Anti Money Laundering Directive
94 Legislative proposal: Amending the Financial Conglomerates Directive (FICOD II) (2002/87/EC)

There are also proposals in the pipeline for 2013 (page 27), a simplification initiative concerning the Statute for a European Company (SE; regulation 2011/2157)(page 39) and a few proposals to withdraw (pages 43-44) in the area of the internal market and services.



Ralf Grahn

P.S. For an interesting and different take of what politics and policies should be about, you can read the blog post by Ronny Patz, #28c3: “The coming war on general purpose computation” as THE 2011 speech, as an introduction to the video presentation by Cory Doctorow.