Medical Equipment Design

At present there are plans to introduce this card in several but not all EU states. Therefore any attempt to make use of this card mandatory would impose 'restraint of trade' conditions on engineers from countries where the card is not introduced. This would inevitably lead to a human rights challenge in the European Court as the right to work and support your family is considered a basic human right. Given the Court's recent decisions which have all been heavily biased in favour in human rights, it is not credible that such a challenge would not be upheld. The EFNEA (the card's sponsors) estimate that there are 3.5 million engineers in Europe that would be affected. With application fees set at €95 for Federation members and €120 for non-members, this represents an expenditure of over €3,500,000,000 ($4,500,000,000) for a card that for the reasons stated above, can never become mandatory. And that figure is just the cost of initial applications to get a card. Further charges rack up once you have a card, just to keep your CV up to date. Then there will be renewal fees.

I am all in favour of promoting transparency and setting comparable standards across the EU. But this should be about "competent engineers" not "qualified engineers" and certainly not about engineers who have bought an EngineerING Card.