Considerations on COM(2013)522 - Amendment of Council Regulation (EC) No 2012/2002 establishing the EU Solidarity Fund - Main contents
Please note
This page contains a limited version of this dossier in the EU Monitor.
| dossier | COM(2013)522 - Amendment of Council Regulation (EC) No 2012/2002 establishing the EU Solidarity Fund. |
|---|---|
| document | COM(2013)522  |
| date | May 15, 2014 |
| (2) | It is important for the Union to have at its disposal a sound and flexible instrument to allow it to show solidarity, send a clear political signal and provide genuine assistance to citizens affected by major natural disasters that have serious repercussions on economic and social development. |
| (3) | The Union’s declared intention to assist candidate countries on the path towards stability and sustainable economic and political development through a clear European perspective should not be set back by the adverse effects of major natural disasters. The Union should, therefore, continue to show solidarity with the third countries that are involved in accession negotiations with it, and with which an intergovernmental accession conference has been opened. The inclusion of those countries in the scope of this Regulation entails, as a consequence, recourse to Article 212 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) as an additional legal basis. |
| (4) | The Commission should be in a position to take a rapid decision to commit specific financial resources and to mobilise them as quickly as possible. Administrative procedures should be adjusted accordingly and limited to the minimum necessary. To that end, the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission concluded the Interinstitutional Agreement of 2 December 2013 on budgetary discipline, on cooperation in budgetary matters and on sound financial management (5). |
| (5) | The terminology contained in, and procedures laid down under, Regulation (EC) No 2012/2002 should be aligned with the provisions of Regulation (EU, Euratom) No 966/2012 of the European Parliament and of the Council (6). |
| (6) | The definition of a natural disaster, which determines the scope of Regulation (EC) No 2012/2002, should be unambiguous. |
| (7) | Damage caused by other types of disaster that through a cascading effect are the direct consequence of a natural disaster should, for the purposes of Regulation (EC) No 2012/2002, be considered to be part of the direct damage caused by that natural disaster. |
| (8) | In order to codify established practice and to ensure equal treatment of applications financial contributions from the Fund should be awarded in respect of direct damage only. |
| (9) | A major natural disaster within the meaning of Regulation (EC) No 2012/2002 should be further defined as a disaster that has caused direct damage above a threshold expressed in financial terms. Such damage should be expressed in the prices of a reference year, or as a percentage of the gross national income (GNI) of the State concerned. |
| (10) | In order to better take into account the specific nature of natural disasters which, although having serious repercussions for the economic and social development of the regions concerned, do not reach the minimum scale required to benefit from a financial contribution from the Fund, the criteria for regional natural disasters should be determined based on the damage calculable by reference to regional gross domestic product (GDP), whereby the specific structural social and economic situation, compounded by the special features of Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Martinique, Réunion, Mayotte, Saint-Martin, the Azores, Madeira and the Canary Islands, as outermost regions within the meaning of Article 349 TFEU, justifies the establishment for them of a special threshold of 1 % of the GDP as a derogation. Those criteria should be determined in a clear and simple manner in order to reduce the possibility of applications being submitted which do not meet the requirements set out in Regulation (EC) No 2012/2002. |
| (11) | For the purposes of determining direct damage, data with a harmonised format, provided by Eurostat, should be used in order to allow an equitable treatment of applications. |
| (12) | The Fund should contribute to the restoration of infrastructure to working order, to the cleaning up of disaster-stricken areas and to the costs of rescue services and temporary accommodation for the population concerned during the whole implementation period. The meaning of restoration of infrastructure to working order should be defined, and the extent to which the Fund will be able to contribute to the corresponding costs clarified. The time-frame during which it is possible to consider the accommodation of people made homeless by a natural disaster to be temporary should also be defined. |
| (13) | The provisions of Regulation (EC) No 2012/2002 should be aligned with the general Union funding policy in relation to value added tax. |
| (14) | It should also be specified to what extent it is possible for eligible operations to include expenditure for technical assistance. |
| (15) | In order to preclude beneficiary States from making a net profit from an intervention through the Fund, the conditions under which operations financed by the Fund are able to generate revenue should be specified. |
| (16) | Certain types of natural disaster, such as, inter alia, droughts, develop over an extended period of time before their effects are felt. Provisions should be laid down in order to allow the use of the Fund also in such cases. |
| (17) | It is important to ensure that eligible States make the requisite efforts to prevent natural disasters from occurring and to mitigate their effects, including by full implementation of relevant Union legislation on disaster risk prevention and management and the use of available Union funding for relevant investments. Provisions should therefore be laid down to make it possible for a failure, as established by a final judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union, by a Member State to comply with relevant Union legislation on disaster risk prevention and management after having received a financial contribution from the Fund for an earlier natural disaster, to result in the rejection of the application or a reduction of the amount of the financial contribution in the event of a further application in relation to a natural disaster of the same nature. |
| (18) | It is possible that Member States require financial support in response to a natural disaster more rapidly than is possible through the normal procedure. For this purpose, it is appropriate to provide for the possibility of making an advance payment upon request by the Member State concerned shortly after the application for a financial contribution from the Fund has been submitted to the Commission. The advance should not exceed a certain amount and it should be accounted for when the final amount of the financial contribution is paid out. Unduly paid advances should be repaid by the Member State within a determined short period of time. The payment of an advance should not prejudice the outcome of the final decision on the mobilisation of the Fund. |
| (19) | Administrative procedures for the payment of a financial contribution should be as simple and time-efficient as possible. Detailed provisions on the implementation of the financial contribution from the Fund should therefore be contained, for Member States, in the implementing acts awarding that financial contribution. However, for beneficiary States which are not yet Member States, separate implementation agreements should be maintained for legal reasons. |
| (20) | The Commission should issue guidance in order to assist the Member States on how to effectively access and use the Fund, and how to apply in the simplest way for assistance from the Fund. |
| (21) | Regulation (EU, Euratom) No 966/2012 introduced changes in shared and indirect management, including specific reporting requirements which should be taken into account. Reporting obligations should reflect the short implementation period of the Fund operations. The procedures for the designation of the bodies responsible for the management and control of Union funds should reflect the nature of the instrument and not delay the payment of the financial contribution from the Fund. It is therefore necessary to derogate from Regulation (EU, Euratom) No 966/2012. |
| (22) | Provisions should be laid down to avoid double financing of operations financed by the Fund with other financial instruments of the Union or international legal instruments relating to the compensation of specific damage. |
| (23) | Declaring expenditure that countries have made from a financial contribution from the Fund should be as simple as possible. A single exchange rate should therefore be used throughout the implementation of the financial contribution for countries that are not members of the euro area. |
| (24) | In order to ensure uniform conditions for the implementation of Regulation (EC) No 2012/2002, implementing powers should be conferred on the Commission with respect to decisions on particular financial contributions or on any advance payments from the Fund to eligible States. |
| (25) | The provisions laid down in Regulation (EC) No 2012/2002 governing the protection of financial interests of the Union should be made more specific so as to clearly identify measures for the prevention, detection and investigation of irregularities, the recovery of funds lost, wrongly paid or incorrectly used. |
| (26) | Since the objectives of this Regulation, namely to ensure Union-wide solidarity action to support natural disaster-stricken States, cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States on an ad-hoc basis, but can rather, by reason of applying a systematic, regular and equitable method of granting financial support involving all Member States according to their capacity, be better achieved at Union level, the Union may adopt measures, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity as set out in Article 5 of the Treaty on European Union. In accordance with the principle of proportionality, as set out in that Article, this Regulation does not go beyond what is necessary to achieve those objectives. |
| (27) | Regulation (EC) No 2012/2002 should therefore be amended accordingly, |