The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) reaffirmed its commitment to youth inclusion in policymaking during a high-level debate with European Commissioner Glenn Micallef at the EESC plenary session. The debate brought together EU stakeholders, youth representatives and institutional leaders to discuss the future of youth participation, intergenerational fairness and the practical tools that make youth mainstreaming a reality, chief among them the EESC Youth Test.
The July plenary session of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) hosted a debate on the political priorities of the current Presidency of the Council of the European Union. Main objectives: the EU must take responsibility for its own security and strengthen its competitiveness.
considers it very important to strengthen the role of European companies in supply chains, including in leadership positions, to support a competitive and sustainable production model throughout the chain, which benefits regions, companies and workers;
recommends developing urgent measures to strengthen the EU internal market, ensuring strategic autonomy and production capacity. In particular, this means advancing EU industrial and competition policies rooted in sustainable competitiveness and innovation;
highlights the need for detailed mapping of supply chains, by analysing individual sectors and levels of company involvement, in order to design targeted policies that address sector-specific challenges and development opportunities, including at regional level.
emphasises the importance of making regulations simpler, and points out how digital tools – including AI and e-government platforms – can boost transparency, efficiency, and accountability in EU law-making;
recommends that all new legal acts at the EU, national, regional, and local levels include a clear summary of obligations, and suggests the same should be done for existing legislation to make regulations more accessible;
stresses the need for a unified, interoperable EU digital platform for lawmaking. This platform would centralise texts and metadata, enable real-time consistency checks, help assess legal interdependencies, and encourage the use of harmonised language.
welcomes the European Commission’s ambition to establish a ‘fifth freedom’, which must include mechanisms to counter disinformation and pseudoscience, build trust in scientific institutions, and promote ‘knowledge literacy’;
calls on the Commission to pursue measures and incentives addressing the challenges linked to scale-ups of firms, of cross-border mobility of people and accessibility of funds and investments;
underlines the importance of a 3% GDP national spending target for research & innovation (R&I), asking for an additional 1% for preparedness and dual-use research. To initiate a breakthrough, the EESC calls for national R&I investments to be decoupled from deficit rules until the 3% spending target is met. In addition, other funds (e.g. cohesion) should be increasingly used and aligned with R&I activities.
Oliver Röpke, President of the European Economic and Social Committee
Organisation
European Economic and Social Committee (EESC)
Nineteen months after the outbreak of the armed conflict in Gaza — triggered by the terrorist attacks by Hamas on Israel on 7 October 2023 — the humanitarian situation in the Gaza strip remains catastrophic. Civilians continue to be the primary victims, with many Israeli hostages still in captivity.
