Overview of European Commission deliberations on accession to the 1997 Agreement. The Commission has determined that the European Community cannot join the agreement in its present form due to incompatibility with the “acquis communautaire”. Important divergences exist regarding both its technical aspects and its scope of application, rendering the efforts required to align EU and 1997 Agreement provisions prohibitive in light of anticipated benefits.
Discussion about the document PTI-04-04: Accession by the European Community to the UNECE 1997 Agreement (WP.29-145-11)
The group studied the document PTI-04-04 (Informal Document No. WP.29-145-11) containing the evaluation made by the European Commission regarding the accession of the 1997 Agreement.
It seems that the obstacles impeaching the EU to join the 1997 Agreement may be reduced with the current approach and taking into consideration that when that document was issued, the 1997 Agreement only had the Rule 1.
FIN highlighted that including M1 and N1 vehicle categories into the scope of the Rules may facilitate the accession of the EU. The NL considered that talking about other categories like motorcycles or light trailers may add further difficulties.
RS draw the attention to the fact that including new categories is out of the scope of the ToR.
RO expressed that, according to their view, the most important obstacle for the EU to join is the item 2.2 of the document, underlining that the 1997 Agreement is only applicable to international traffic.