Passenger ships: safety rules and standards. Recast

PURPOSE: recast of Council Directive 98/18/EC on safety rules and standards for passenger ships.

PROPOSED ACT: Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council.

CONTENT: the codification of Council Directive 98/18/EC has been initiated by the Commission. The new Directive was to have superseded the various acts incorporated in it.

In the meantime Decision 1999/468/EC laying down the procedures for the exercise of implementing powers conferred on the Commission has been amended by Decision 2006/512/EC, which introduced a regulatory procedure with scrutiny for measures of general scope designed to amend non-essential elements of a basic instrument adopted in accordance with the procedure referred to in Article 251 of the Treaty (co-decision procedure), including by deleting some of those elements or by supplementing the instrument by the addition of new non-essential elements.

In accordance with the joint statement of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission on Decision 2006/512/EC, for this new procedure to be applicable to instruments adopted in accordance with the co-decision procedure which are already in force, those instruments must be adjusted in accordance with the applicable procedures.

The Commission feels that it is therefore appropriate to transform the codification of Directive 98/18/EC into a recast in order to incorporate the amendments necessary for the adjustment to the regulatory procedure with scrutiny.

On comitology, the new text states the following:

-power should be conferred on the Commission to adapt certain provisions of the Directive, as well as Annex I, to take account of developments at international level and specifically amendments to International Conventions. Since those measures are of general scope and are designed to amend non-essential elements of this Directive, they should be adopted in accordance with the regulatory procedure with scrutiny;

-the new elements introduced into the Directive only concern the committee procedures. They therefore do not need to be transposed by the Member States.