Letter to Barroso on alignment of commission governance

José Manuel Barroso
President
European Commission
1049 Brussels
Belgium

Brussels, 5 November 2009

Alignment of Commission governance on medicinal products and medical devices to the Lisbon Treaty

Dear President,

You are currently in the process of taking important decisions with regard to the portfolios of the future Commissioners.

The Treaty of the Functioning of the European Union as part of the Lisbon Treaty explicitly puts measures related to medicinal products and devices for medical use into the Article on public health (Article 152(4)(c)). This reflects the fact that measures related to medicinal products and devices for medical use are – and should be – an integral part of health policy.

In view of the near-finalisation of the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, we would like to urge you to be proactive and thus to rearrange the corresponding responsibilities in the European Commission. For the next college, it would be highly desirable if the Health Commissioner were in charge of policies related to pharmaceuticals and medical devices. This should obviously go hand in hand with a shift of the relevant responsibilities from the Directorate-General Enterprise and Industry to the Directorate-General Health and Consumers.

Such a re-organisation would not only align the Commission structure to the Lisbon Treaty. It would also come with numerous additional benefits:
* alignment to the responsibilities for these policies in the Member States and in the European Parliament,
* increased public confidence in Community measures related to medicinal products and medical devices,
* a consolidation of the responsibilities for Health Policies in the Commission with a proper portfolio for the Health Commissioner (instead of the confusing split of responsibilities between current Commissioners: the Health Commissioner currently being in charge of  Community actions with regard to policies relating to pandemic influenza, the Enterprise Commissioner being responsible for the authorisation of vaccines against these pandemic diseases).

We hope that you seize this important occasion to demonstrate to the European citizen that effective protection of human health is a top priority for you.

Yours sincerely,

Chris Davies
MEP
Coordinator of the ALDE group in the ENVI Committee of the European Parliament

Satu Hassi
MEP
Coordinator of the Greens/EFA group in the ENVI Committee of the European Parliament

Kartika Liotard
MEP
Coordinator of the GUE group in the ENVI Committee of the European Parliament