The main industry associations of France, Germany, and Italy have for the first time issued a joint demand for a deep revision of the European Union’s Emissions Trading System, directly appealing to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen ahead of a scheduled 17 July review proposal. In a letter, Confindustria, Medef, and the BDI — together representing nearly 500,000 companies — call for carbon market rules to be brought into line with industrial reality, citing high energy costs and global competitive pressure. Their requests include maintaining free allowances and ETS cost compensation until the carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) is fully effective, extending CBAM to processed products, excluding maritime transport and aviation from the system, and channelling all ETS revenues into decarbonisation investment. The intervention draws on a University of Milano-Bicocca study suggesting that emissions reductions between 2013 and 2024 owed more to plant closures than to the trading mechanism itself.

Simultaneously, nine Schengen-area governments — Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Switzerland — have asked the European Commission to prolong operational flexibilities for the Entry/Exit System (EES), the biometric border control platform that has generated multi-hour queues and terminal failures since its full launch in April 2026. In a 7 July letter to the Commissioner for Home Affairs and Migration, the states reported “serious difficulties” and requested that the backup mechanism allowing border guards to suspend fingerprint and facial-photo collection during outages and congestion be extended beyond its 6 September expiry. A Commission spokesperson acknowledged that existing legislation already permits some flexibility, including during the summer period. The EES disruptions have already forced the postponement of the linked ETIAS online travel authorisation system to at least 2027.

On a parallel track, the EU’s AI Act is drawing scrutiny for the phased application of its rules to migration and asylum technologies. The legislation classifies several border and asylum systems — including lie-detection-style credibility assessments, risk-profiling tools, and biometric matching — as high-risk, but a package of amendments known as the “AI Omnibus” has deferred core obligations such as risk management, data quality, human oversight, and fundamental rights impact assessments from August 2024 to 2 December 2027. The European Digital Rights network (EDRi) warned that the delay affects domains where individuals have the least capacity to challenge technology, and cautioned that some providers may rush systems to market before the new deadline. Petra Molnar, co-director of the Refugee Law Lab at York University, described migration as the “sacrificial zone” of the law, noting that large-scale databases such as Eurodac and ETIAS enjoy extended compliance timelines up to 2030, while national security carve-outs exempt most border technologies entirely.

Viewed from Brussels, the three dossiers expose a structural tension between regulatory ambition and operational or economic constraints. Industry federations argue that the carbon market, as currently designed, risks deindustrialisation without delivering proportionate emissions cuts. Member states confront the practical limits of biometric infrastructure at busy crossing points. Rights organisations and legal scholars contend that the delayed AI obligations create an accountability vacuum precisely where automated decisions carry the gravest human consequences. The Commission is expected to table its ETS revision on 17 July; a decision on the EES flexibility extension is pending, while the AI Act’s staggered compliance calendar will see the first high-risk system rules take effect only in late 2027.