Nine countries face legal action over water quality

Date: 01/07/1999

By Renée Cordes
AS THE summer holiday season gets under way, the European Commission is planning legal action against nine member states for failing to comply with bathing water quality requirements.

Acting Environment Com-missioner Ritt Bjerregaard will call for infringement proceedings to be launched against Finland, Denmark, Italy, Greece, Ireland, Sweden, France, Spain and the UK for falling short of their responsibilities under a 1976 EU law.

The move comes as the Commission examines ways to bolster the legislation after years of problems in enforcing it, and follows a European Court of Justice ruling against Germany last month for failing to take water samples properly and exceeding permissible limits of some pollutants.

"After the Court ruling, we feel we are now in a position to go against a number of individual states." said a Bjerregaard aide. "Even though compliance in general is getting better, it is not good enough."

Environmental groups have applauded the move to crack down on recalcitrant member states. "If the Commission is taking people to court we welcome that." said Eva Royo Gelabert of the World Wide Fund for Nature. "The main problem has been insufficient sampling in fresh water areas."

She added that the 1976 EU bathing water directive was virtually obsolete and needed to be amended to reflect the new technology available.

In its report on bathing water quality in 1998, the Commission found that nearly 95% of coastal bathing areas and 86% of fresh water bathing sites met minimum requirements. But the report con-cluded that overall, the quality of coastal bathing areas was only "improving marginally".

In some countries, such as Belgium and Denmark, the level of compliance had declined, while the results in others such as Greece, Spain, Ireland and Italy were only slightly better than during the 1997 swimming season.

Although fresh water areas fared better, the Commission expressed concern about the "high number" in which too few water samples had been taken.

Commission officials said they regarded compliance levels below 95% of minimum standards as insufficient. Finland, for example, met only around 80% of the minimum requirements for coastal waters.