On Wednesday 21 March, C&V Consulting submitted its contribution to the public consultation launched by the European Commission to prepare the mid-term evaluation of the European Defence Fund.
C&V Consulting has been involved in the EDF since its inception, supporting the consortium coordinator during the proposal preparation phase and currently contributing to 5 ongoing EDF projects focusing on frugal artificial intelligence (FaRADAI), manned-unmanned ground systems (COMMANDS), green transition and security of energy supply (INDY), cybersecurity (FACT) and SFCPC2 (PROTEAS).
In most of these projects, we are responsible for ensuring the ethical and legal compliance of the R&D activity and the solution developed. Indeed, we believe that ethical compliance is a key success factor for both the development of these projects and their future exploitation.
This experience leads us to make a number of observations:
The objective of the European Defence Fund (EDF) is twofold:
- To provide the EU armed forces with the most advanced capabilities based on the European Defence Technological and Industrial Base (EDTIB);
- To enhance the competitiveness and strategic autonomy of the EDTIB. It is crucial that the projects financed by the EDF continue to comply with European rules and legislation, in particular as regards the ethical compatibility of the systems, most of which are lethal weapons.
In this respect, we propose two improvements to the EDF in terms of ethical compliance:
- The development of a specific ethics assessment grid, including at least three new specific areas dedicated to the ‘ethics by design’ compliance of deliveries;
- An additional award criterion dedicated to ethics by design compliance.
Read the position paper enclosed to find out more: Mid-term evaluation of the EDF – C&V Position paper