General Introduction to Public Consultations

In compliance with Article 4(5) of Regulation (EU) 2018/1971 , where appropriate, BEREC shall consult interested parties before adopting opinions, regulatory best practices or reports and give them the opportunity to send their comments on the draft documents within a reasonable period of time.

BEREC also has an obligation to make the results of each consultation procedure publicly available while taking into account any confidentiality-related issues.

With a view to streamlining the whole process for consulting interested parties on any draft BEREC documents and in order to increase the transparency of its procedure, the Board of Regulators adopted a decision defining BEREC procedures for holding public consultations (Decision BoR (10) 27).

On topics of significant  interest, BEREC may decide also to organise a public hearing.

The public consultations are organised in compliance with the following procedure:

• the Board of Regulators has to decide whether a written consultation or a public hearing is needed, or both is needed; in doing so, the Board of Regulators will take into account the nature of the subject in question, possible alternatives to consultation, confidentiality issues, the interests of third parties and the urgency of the matter.
• When the Board of Regulators decides to organise a written consultation on a draft BEREC document, it has be made public by means of publication on the BEREC website, together with information about how to submit responses to the consultation.
• If the Board of Regulators decides to organise a public hearing, the document which is consulted upon, along with an invitations to the hearing, has to be published on the BEREC web site.
• The period granted for submitting written contributions should normally be 30 days after the announcement of the consultation.
• BEREC will publish a summary of all contributions received and an explanation as to how the results of the consultation were taken into account in the final position. This will be published on the BEREC website, taking into account any confidentiality requests received.
• All contributions received within the consultation procedure have to be published, as well, on the BEREC website, unless specified otherwise by the author of the contribution.
• Stakeholders, who  request confidentiality of all or part of the documents submitted to a public consultation, shall indicate this upon submission of the materials. If there is no clear indication that all of part of the documents are confidential, BEREC will presume that the documents can be made available to the public.