European Commission Directives and Decisions
- R&TTE 1999/5/EC
Directive 1999/5/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 9 March 1999 on Radio and Telecommunications Terminal Equipment (R&TTE) and the mutual recognition of their conformityThe R&TTE Directive is an EC Directive on radio laws in Europe. It applies to all “radio” equipment operating at frequencies higher then 9 KHz. The directive includes several other directives like:
-73/23/EEC Low Voltage Directive
-89/336/EEC EMC Directive
-1999/519/EC EMF Recommendation
According to the directive, the following essential requirements are applicable to all apparatus:
The protection of the health and safety of the user and any
other person, including the objectives with respect to safety
requirements contained in Directive 73/23/EEC, but with no voltage
limit applying;
The protection requirements with respect to electromagnetic
compatibility contained in directive 89/336/EEC.
In addition, radio equipment shall be constructed in a way that it
effectively uses the spectrum allocated to terrestrial/space
radiocommunication and orbital resources so as to avoid harmful
interference.
All RFID systems and applications are under the R&TTE directive.
The directive refers to several mandated standards and is the most
important EC directive for RFID applications.
- 2006/804/EC
Commission decision 2006/804/EC of 23 November 2006 on harmonisation of the radio spectrum for radio frequency identification (RFID) devices operating in the ultra high frequency (UHF) band
The European Commission has confirmed its objective to harmonise the European UHF frequency spectrum. In November 2006 the Directive 2006/804/EC was adopted. This directive makes it mandatory for all European member states to make a unique frequency spectrum available within 6 months. The spectrum parameters are based on the ERC/REC 70-03 and on the ETSI standard EN 302 208. Through this fact there are also several restrictions. The spectrum is only usable for smaller applications, because listen-before-talk is required and there is no plan which describes the operation of more then one reader on a channel. Further steps will be the adoption of a new channel plan and the implementation of synchronisation methods for listen-before-talk. This is already done in the Technical Specification TS 102 562, which was published in March 2007. In the long term listen-before-talk will be eliminated. This leads to a change of the EN 302 208 standard and the REC 70-03 planned for early 2008. The United Kingdom has already eliminated the listen-before-talk process in accordance with the implementation of this directive. The harmonisation of the frequency spectrum should support the development of the European RFID technology.
- 2006/24/EC
Directive 2006/24/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 March 2006 on the retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks and amending directive 2002/58/EC
The directive specifies the management, the storage and the access to individual data captured by public electronic communications services. The harmonisation of the data management should ensure that the data are available for the purpose of the investigation, detection and prosecution of serious crimes, as defined by each member state in its national laws. Access to the data should be provided only to the competent national authorities in specific cases and in accordance with national laws.
The directive corresponds to the following directives:
-95/46/EC
-2002/58/EG
Usually RFID data do not fall in the directive about data retention.
