Now is the right time for anyone who feels that the current EU rules regulating the free movement of professionals are unnecessarily cumbersome to make his or her voice heard! The European Commission recently launched a public consultation on the professional qualifications directive with the precise objective of garnering feedback from EU citizens on the practical difficulties, if any, encountered by those professionals who seek to exercise their profession in a member state other than their home state.
The EU’s Professional Qualifications Directive encompasses more than 800 professions which are regulated by member states and which can be pursued only if certain professional qualifications have been acquired. Access to a profession is often subject to a person holding a specific qualification, such as a degree or a diploma from a university.
However, national requirements often differ from country to country and may make the right to exercise one’s profession in a member state other than the home State difficult to exercise in practice. To this end, EU rules were enacted which make provision for the mutual recognition of qualifications by EU member states.
If a professional wants to relocate to another member state in order to exercise his or her profession there, he/she may be required to apply to have his or her professional qualifications recognised. The current EU directive makes provision for different routes that one has to go through, depending on the profession in question.
For a limited number of professions, the directive makes provision for an automatic recognition of qualifications. This means that the host state must only check whether or not the qualifications are in line with what is required under the directive. Professionals including doctors, dentists, nurses, midwives, pharmacists, veterinary surgeons, and architects benefit from an automatic recognition of their qualifications. This is because the minimum training requirements for such professions have been harmonised across the EU.
Therefore, for example, a British doctor qualified in the UK must be recognised as a doctor in all other member states. The same applies to professionals in the craft, commerce and industry sectors who can demonstrate relevant work experience either as a self-employed professional or as the manager of a company. In the case of lawyers, a different set of laws make provision for the mutual recognition of the home country registration and title of a lawyer.
On the other hand, for a large majority of professions a so-called general system allows for the mutual recognition of qualifications. Member states proceed on a case-by-case basis and can exercise their own discretion in terms of granting access to a given profession. In principle, access to regulated professions is granted to any individual who can demonstrate that he/she is fully qualified in their home country.
It is only in those cases where an individual’s qualifications differ substantially from those of the host country or in cases where the length of time spent in the profession falls short of the host country’s requirements, that compensatory measures may be imposed to make up for the shortfall. In such a case, the directive allows the professional in question to choose between a period of supervised practice and an aptitude test. Successful completion of either ought to grant an individual full access to his/her field.
The Commission is now seeking to ascertain whether the current EU rules ought to be ear-marked for improvement. The consultation is focusing on three key challenges. Primarily, it is seeking to ascertain whether the current rules ought to be simplified and made more user-friendly. The Commission is also ruminating over the idea of introducing a European professional card which could make it easier for professionals wanting to work abroad to demonstrate their credentials.
The directive itself caters for such a card but such an idea seems not to have garnered enough support from authorities and therefore has never materialised. Another aspect that the Commission is seeking viewpoints upon is whether there is the need to modernise the training requirements for those professions which to date benefit from automatic recognition such as pharmacists and architects, amongst others.
There are other areas where the Commission has recognised improvements could be made, such as in the area of cooperation between member states. For instance, relevant authorities from all member states should alert their counterparts in other member states in instances involving the use of falsified documents, such as diplomas, and in cases involving professional misconduct. At present, such an alert mechanism does not exist for all professions, and in particular, it does not exist for the healthcare professions.
Stakeholders now have until March 15 to air their views, with an open meeting scheduled by the Commission for all interested parties for February 21.
Since 1998, around 200,000 citizens took advantage of the current EU rules and sought to have their professional qualifications recognised by a member state other than the home state. The working age population in many member states is constantly shrinking, leaving various gaps in the labour market. To counteract this phenomena it is therefore now essential more than ever before to facilitate the free movement of professionals from one member state to another.
mariosa@vellacardona.com
Dr Vella Cardona is a practising lawyer and a freelance consultant in EU, intellectual property, consumer protection and competition law. She is also a member of the National Commission for the Promotion of Equality.