Authors, performers, and other artists share their joint position on AgoraEU

Ensuring AgoraEU can effectively support authors, performers, and other artists and cultural workers across all cultural and creative sectors: joint comments and voting recommendations on the proposed amendments to the AgoraEU programme

Brussels, 17 September 2026

Dear Member of the Culture and Education (CULT) Committee, 

Dear Member of the Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) Committee,

We are writing to you on behalf of a coalition of professional organisations representing the collective voice of hundreds of thousands of writers, journalists, literary translators, actors, musicians, composers, songwriters, screen directors, screenwriters, visual artists, and other cultural and creative workers – across the cultural and creative sectors.

On 3 June 2026, MEPs Emma Rafowicz and Alice Kuhnke presented their draft report in the European Parliament’s CULT and LIBE committees. Our organisations warmly welcome such a report and would like to provide our recommendations on all key amendments which reflect crucial priorities for our creative communities.

EU funding programmes dedicated to the cultural and creative sectors such as the existing Creative Europe programme play an essential role to support and promote artistic creation and cultural diversity across Europe. However, programme beneficiaries fail too often to guarantee safe and fair working conditions and comply with authors’ and performers’ rights under EU law.

In line with the intended objective of AgoraEU to “contribute to the improvement of working conditions for artists and cultural and creative professionals”, we urge you to include clear provisions on fair working conditions and social conditionality, respect of existing copyright rules, including fair contracts as well as proportionate and appropriate remuneration and priority for works and performances based on human creation.

1.     Support fair working conditions and social conditionality

Fair working conditions and social conditionality should be core requirements of AgoraEU. Public funding for culture should not be extended unconditionally: without a binding requirement to uphold minimum social standards and fair working conditions, the programme risks financing cultural activities while leaving the authors and performers who produce them without adequate protection, undermining the very people the culture it funds depends on.

Programme beneficiaries should comply with applicable Union and national rules and ensure fair working conditions for workers and self-employed professionals, including “respect for minimum social standards such as labour rights, decent working conditions, non-discrimination, accessibility, and fair and equal remuneration”. In addition, we urge MEPs to strengthen support to authors, performers and their organisations – which remains unfortunately very limited in existing programmes.

We therefore call for the adoption of amendments, 13, 16, 46, 87, 90, 92, 100, 101, 103, 128, 193, 237, 281, 299, 307, 390, 475, 487, 565, 600, 605, 609, 728, 731, 819, 839, 850, 867, 896, 899, 901, 971, 1284, 1287, 1315, 1513, 1539 and for the rejection of amendments 841 and 891.

2.     Ensure the respect for existing authors’ and performers’ IP rights

Copyright and related rights under EU law grant vital rights to authors and performers alike, in particular Articles 18 to 23 of the Directive 2019/790 which establish binding obligations on transparency and fair remuneration in contracts. AgoraEU must only support beneficiaries who comply with EU law, so that authors’ and performers’ rights are not merely recognised in principle but actively respected in practice. Furthermore, all references to the rights of authors alone shall be amended to expressly also include performers: their intellectual property rights are no less essential to their livelihoods and there is no justification for the Programme to treat the two groups unequally. A mere reference to a future non-binding EU Artists Charter cannot replace the need to comply with existing, binding EU law.

We therefore call for the adoption of amendments 173 (further amended to include performers), 288, 272, 273, 821, 853, 951, 961, 962, 1254 (further amended as above), 1531 and for the rejection of amendment 830.

3.     Prioritise human created works and performances

Public cultural funding such as AgoraEU should support only human expression, artistic diversity and professional creative communities. For this reason, we support amendments giving priority to works and performances where human creativity is the substantial, identifiable source.

We therefore support amendments 92, 102, 131, 282, 259, 652, 889, 895, 900, 980, 1094, 1102, 1104, 1107, 1249, 1479.

We thank CULT and LIBE Members for considering our recommendations (see annex below) which seek to ensure AgoraEU can support fair, sustainable and human-centred cultural and creative sectors in Europe.