The European Commission considered on Thursday 15 June that the Chinese telecom equipment suppliers Huawei and ZTE posed a security risk to the European Union (EU) and announced that it would therefore no longer subscribe to mobile telephone services s relying on the equipment of these companies.
Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton called on the 27 member countries and telecom operators to exclude this equipment from their mobile networks. “We cannot afford to maintain dependencies that could become weapons against our interests. It would be too great a risk to our common security.”he said at a press conference in Brussels.
The EU executive said in a statement that Huawei and ZTE “represented materially higher risks than other 5G vendors”. The Commission added that it would “take the necessary security measures not to acquire new connectivity services based on the equipment of these suppliers”.
A “major security risk”
Europe is under pressure from the United States to exclude these Chinese companies accused of allowing espionage activities on behalf of Beijing. Washington has already banned the sale of equipment from five Chinese vendors, including Huawei and ZTE. Bans on the supply of 5G equipment have also already been taken in the UK and Canada, but European countries are divided on the approach to take.
In ” toolbox “ of January 2020, the Member States and the Commission had formulated recommendations intended to protect 5G networks in the EU from the risks of espionage or sabotage. However, these measures have no binding legal force and high-risk suppliers are not named. The latter are defined as equipment manufacturers likely to be subject to interference from a third country, for example due to the existence of a close link with the government of this country or the legislation of the country, and the The risk that they are is all the greater when no data protection agreement has been concluded with the EU.
Three years later, twenty-four of the twenty-seven EU Member States have transposed the toolbox recommendations into their national legislation. “To date, only ten of them have used these prerogatives to restrict or exclude high-risk suppliers. It is too slow, and it poses a major security risk and exposes the collective security of the Union”estimated Thierry Breton.