European Commission - Speech

[Check Against Delivery]

Opening remarks by Commissioner Johansson at the press conference on

EU critical infrastructure resilience
Strasbourg, 18 October 2022
Good afternoon everybody.
In the last 24 hours we have seen in Ukraine massive attacks on critical infrastructure. The aim of
Putin with these drones attacks has been specifically to attack the electricity supply.
You are probably also all aware of the recent attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines, and on the
German rail. So it's clear that we are in a situation where the threats towards critical infrastructure is
very high and we need to act towards that.
Luckily, we do not start only now. We started, from the Commission side, already two years ago
when we presented the two new or renewed directives, both on the Directive on the resilience of
critical infrastructure, and the Directive on the security of network and information systems, the so
called ‘CER Directive' and ‘NIS2 Directive'.
This is to better protect physical and cyber infrastructure from attacks, but also improve on the
resilience and recovery when an attack take place.
These two directives are twin directives, so they are linked to each other even if they're not identical
and they broaden the scope significantly, if you compare to the current situation.
When we presented the two proposals, luckely the two co-legislator was very eager to adopt them,
so we reached a political agreement already during the French Presidency before the summer, and
now these two directives are soon coming into place.
So that's where we start from. Now what we are presenting today as a proposed Council
recommendation on a coordinated approach to strengthen the resilience of the critical infrastructure.
We focus in this recommendation on 3 different strands: the preparedness; the response and the
international cooperation, and as you can understand the preparedness is the biggest part because
we need to be better prepared for things that could happen. So what we are stressing here is to
implement the new directives earlier than foreseen.
To start already with some of the proposed cooperation arrangement, so both me and Thierry Breton
have already started with the cooperation groups, the networks from a representative from all
Member States to coordinate this approach.
On the preparedness, we say that we should do this earlier, but also to help and support Member
States when it comes to the protection and to do the stress test of critical entities. We also say that
we should prioritise energy, transport and space in what we're doing now.
In energy, transport, digital infrastructure and space, Member States are already doing stress tests.
Now we will support them in all way that they might need with coordination with expertise, with
exchange of best practices. When it comes to the response side, for example, we already have in
place the civil protection mechanism - what we stress here - is the use of the civil protection
mechanism in the way to respond to attacks towards critical infrastructure.
We also will develop a new expertise, for example in carrying out a special study when it comes to
the undersea cables, how to protect them better - this is an expertise that we are now proposing that
the Commission should do special study on that.
On the international side, we will strengthen our cooperation with NATO. We will also strengthen our
cooperation when it comes to neighboring countries, for example in the Western Balkans.
This has been very well achieved by the Member States, they are already doing a lot under their
responsibility of course, but they are welcoming the new regulation and are very eager to start
implementing this earlier than expected, and they welcome the support that we can give them.
SPEECH/22/6265
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