Dear trESS friends,

With pleasure I present you our December trESS e-newsletter. Approaching the end of 2012 and already looking forward to 2013, we are happy to update you about what is going on in our project and, of course, about the latest developments in the field of EU social security coordination.

As to the activities of the project, we stick to our yearly habit of presenting you a number of interesting reports on the topic of EU social security coordination. Two of them (‘The coordination of unemployment benefits’ and ‘The coordination of benefits with activation measures’) have already been presented at the December meeting of the Administrative Commission and were very well received there. You can find the results of this work on the trESS website, so it is up to you to take a look at them as well and to let us know your comments via our social media pages. New topics for reports in 2013 have already been fixed. We would also like to remind you to take a look at our renewed website and to keep inviting your colleagues to join our social media platforms if they are interested in EU social security coordination.

This newsletter also features a lot of news from the Commission, predominantly with regard to the recently published public consultation on the revision of the Regulations and also with regard to infringement procedures that were recently initiated. As there was no news from the ECJ in the last quarter of the year, we have replaced this section with a piece on the most recently published documents in the domain of the Coordination Regulations. There you can find the revised Practical Guide on applicable legislation and the recently available consolidated version of Implementing Regulation 987/2009.

Taking a look inside the offices of the European Commission, Ms Miroslava Hajkova was prepared to give us some interesting first insights into the upcoming Commission exercise to substantially revise Regulations 883/2004 and 987/2009 in the fields of unemployment and long-term care. It is self-evident that this revision will be one of the main talking points for 2013 and 2014.

Finally, we are glad to present you a fresh selection of recent publications in the field of social security coordination in our ‘SSC Literature Corner’.

I wish you a very pleasant read and, also on behalf of the entire trESS network, I would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy 2013, in which we will welcome Croatia as a new member of the EU.

Kind regards,

Yves Jorens
Project Director