Croatian MEP Biljana Borzan slammed the announced proposal to change EU's flight delay compensation rules on Wednesday, calling the idea of extending delay times required for passengers to claim payments "dangerous and brazen."

Her statement came in response to a report released by the Reuters news agency on Tuesday which said that Croatia, which is currently holding the rotating six-month Presidency of the EU, proposed changing the rules of compensation for flight delays and cancellations that passengers in the EU are entitled to.

Currently, EU travellers can claim to up to €600 from airline companies if the flight they booked gets delayed by three hours or more, or if it gets cancelled less than 14 days before departure date. But in spite of the rules being in place for years, data shows that most EU travellers are poorly informed about their rights.

“I think this suggestion is scandalous! The rights of airline passengers have been in place for years, and yet only 14 percent of citizens are aware of them. A whopping 72 percent of passengers avoid making complaints when they run into problems, because they believe they would not be compensated enough, or simply because they think it’s pointless,” Borzan said in a press release.

But some EU countries and courts have criticised the current rules, saying that their courts are struggling to process the large number of claims they receive every year, and also because airlines’ compensation payments have become a huge burden to them as they are thought to have grown to hundreds of millions of euros every year.

Reuters reported on Wednesday that in 2018, some 17.6 million passengers were affected by cancellations, and 16.5 million by a long flight delay. And according to European Commission’s figures, flight cancellations in the EU increased by 70 percent in the period from 2011 to 2018, while the share of delayed flights went up by 56 percent.

In a compromise solution, the European Commission had suggested in 2013 that the minimum flight delay required for compensation should be increased from three to five hours. Although the talks to change legislation were later abandoned, the latest news is viewed as a renewed attempt to increase minimum delay rules.

But Borzan, a member of the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SDP) and a long-time MEP, and who is known for championing consumer rights in Strasbourg, said that the idea amounts to little more than limiting and reducing travellers’ consumer rights.

“Reducing a right that passengers often fail to claim anyway is dangerous and brazen! If the Croatian government continues pushing for this proposal, I will do everything in my power to stop it from being passed in the European Parliament,” Borzan warned.