INTRODUCTION

On 16 March 2023, the European Commission (the Commission) adopted the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA), which following the ordinary legislative procedure entered into force on 23 May 2024 with the European Parliament and Council reaching a provisional agreement after only a few months of negotiations. While the EU recognises that access to critical raw materials (CRMs) is essential to both the clean energy transition, as well as Europe's open strategic autonomy, and it has set ambitious goals in this respect, many legal and policy questions remain. For example, what prompted the EU to adopt this Regulation and what is the main objective of the CRMA? What are the opportunities, as well as the challenges of the CRMA? What problems can the CRMA contribute to solving, and which issues will remain? The aim of this chapter is threefold: to provide the geopolitical dynamics, context and existing obstacles that led to the adoption of the CRMA in the first place; to present the Act's core features; and, finally, to address some challenges of the CRMA both within the EU legal orders, as well as in its interaction with international trade law, including broader EU trade policy in the critical raw materials sector. Section 2 will first cover the context of reassessing the strategic dependencies that Europe has developed over the past decades. Section 3 will present the core features of the Act. Section 4 will then critically reflect on the opportunities, as well as the challenges of the Act, also considering potential tension with core World Trade Organization (WTO) rules. The conclusion will recap our main points.