In September, EGMF, together with several other industry organisations, signed a joint industry statement that urges the EU institutions and Member States to ensure consistency within the New Legislative Framework (NLF) terminology. The NLF is important to industry as for over a decade it has provided a comprehensive regime for market surveillance, improved the quality of conformity assessment, and enhanced regulatory certainty and ease of compliance.
This joint statement focuses in particular on the proposed regulation establishing harmonised rules on artificial intelligence, the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act). The AI Act builds on the legal architecture of the NLF for products while adapting it to its specificities. The NLF represents a blueprint for a range of product legislations and EGMF supports the incorporation its principles into the AI Act. However, it is essential that this is done in a coherent way by policy makers and that additional layers of AI-specific requirements, and in the future other product-specific legislation, do not affect the good functioning of the NLF. Promoting alignment of the AI Act with horizontal and sectoral legislation is also a means of encouraging legal clarity in regulatory compliance.
More concretely, the statement aims to provide high-level recommendations to policy makers in the European Parliament, currently drafting compromise amendments to the AI Act, and to raise their awareness of the requirements of NLF legislation.
The joint statement was shared with policy makers in late September.