Machinery. Recast

PURPOSE: to lay down the essential health and safety requirements of the design and manufacture of machinery placed on the internal market.

LEGISLATIVE ACT: Directive 2006/42/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council on machinery and amending Directive 95/16/EC (recast).

CONTENT: the Council approved Parliamentary amendments on the draft Directive on the technical harmonisation for machines, which amends Directive 95/16/EC. The Directive is deemed to have been adopted in the form of the common position, as amended by the European Parliament during its second reading.

The Directive’s objective is to update technical prescriptions of existing community legislation which governs the design and construction of machinery, interchangeable equipment, safety components, lifting accessories, removable mechanical transmission devices and partly completed machinery. The agreed text improves legal certainty by clarifying the Directive’s scope and meaning and by removing ambiguities that have led to diverging interpretations. For example, there will be clearer borderlines to other directives such as the Lifts and Low Voltage Directives. Market surveillance and surveillance of product certification bodies is made more efficient by improved co-ordination at EU-level and monitoring at national level. It covers anything from small consumer products such as handheld power tools, outboard engines to large professional products such as paper making machinery or tower cranes.

The agreed text defines only the essential health and safety requirements of general application, supplemented by a number of more specific requirements for certain categories of machinery.

ENTRY INTO FORCE: 29 June 2006

TRANSPOSITION: 29 June 2008. The Member States will have until 29 December 2009 to apply the Directive’s provisions.