Proposal for a Council Decision authorising the Member States which are Contracting Parties to the Vienna Convention on Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage of 21 May 1963 to ratify the Protocol amending that Convention in the interest of the European Union, or to accede to it

Currently, the international nuclear liability regime is governed primarily by two instruments: the "Vienna Convention" as amended by the 1997 Protocol and the "Paris Convention" on Third Party Liability in the Field of Nuclear Energy of 1960 which was amended by several protocols and supplemented by the Brussels Convention of 31 January 1963. Both these Conventions share similar main principles on substance. However, some of the EU Member States are Contracting Parties to the Paris Convention, others to the Vienna Convention.

Articles 12 to14 of the 1997 Protocol include provisions on the jurisdiction and on recognition and enforcement of judgments relating to the application of the Vienna Convention. These rules affect provisions contained in the European Union law, in particular, in Council Regulation (EC) No 44/2001 of 22 December 2000 on jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial matters. The Union therefore has exclusive competence over those provisions set up in the 1997 Protocol. Consequently the Member States cannot become Contracting Parties to the 1997 Protocol as far as those provisions are concerned.

In a similar situation concerning the Protocol of 12 February 2004 amending the Paris Convention, Council Decisions were adopted in order to authorise the concerned Member States to sign and ratify or accede to the Protocol in the interest of the Union. A similar solution is suggested in this case.

EUR-Lex: COM(2012)550: Follow the progress of this document through the decision-making procedure http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/HIS/?uri=COM:2012:550:FIN

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