Commission aims to hasten EU law implementation

Date: 02/11/1995

By Fiona McHugh and Rory Watson

THE European Commission is planning to sharpen up its heavily overburdened internal procedures for ensuring all member states fully respect EU legislation.

Ways of ensuring recalcitrant governments implement Union law are now being worked on by senior officials and are due to be considered for the first time before Christmas.

“There is a widespread feeling that more could be done. We are looking into the system to see how we can reconcile the need for speedy responses with member states' right to defend themselves,” a senior official confirmed this week.

The current system is becoming swamped as it tries to cope with up to 5,000 complaints at any one time about the way the 15 EU governments implement the 1,200 or so individual items of European legislation.

At their most recent quarterly meeting in mid-October to consider the latest batch of 100 cases, Cabinet members and senior officials involved in the various infringement proceedings were told that the existing system had reached its limits and that improvements were imperative. Under current rules, complaints should be investigated and dealt with within a year of being received, yet some dating from the late 1980s are still being handled.

As the main watchdog of EU law, the Commission is also aware that its credibility is at stake.

“If we do not discipline governments for breaking the treaties as effectively as we discipline the private sector over competition rules, then we can hardly talk of a level playing field. Moreover the rules governments are not applying are often those that determine the climate in which the private sector has to operate,” admits one senior official.

Pressure for change is coming more from the failings of an overloaded system than from accusations that national lobbying is taking place to prevent the Commission from opening embarrassing legal action against a member state.

The previous practice of Cabinet members trying to head off legal action by producing a government letter at the last minute promising action has now been ruled out of order.

“There is no doubt that there used to be quite a lot of national lobbying and cases do get postponed because of special pleading. I suppose some still takes place. But the system is much more impartial now than it used to be. It is also valid to have some filter to spell out the possible political repercussions if legal action is taken and to suggest that the time might not be ripe,” explains one senior official.

Privately, certain Commission staff admit that political considerations can never be fully discounted, but there is growing support for early stages of the procedure to be more automatic, in particular up to and including an official warning letter to governments that legal action threatens if they do not put their house in order.

The threat of having to defend their inactivity before EU judges is often sufficient to encourage governments to implement the rules. There is growing support in the Commission for the idea that all diplomatic channels to resolve problems should be explored before any formal legal action is considered.

Other ideas being mooted to ensure the uniform application of EU law include shorter deadlines for the many different legal stages, a greater role for national courts and bunching together similar cases to save time.

Commission departments handling a heavy legislative workload are the ones most frustrated by the delays that have crept into the system. At the last infringement meeting in October, seven of the 16 cases involving environmental legislation, 18 of the 26 internal market matters (many of them dealing with European voting rights) and 11 of the 15 taxation cases were postponed for consideration at a later date.

“That is probably the real issue. There may not have been much political discussion over more than half a dozen of the cases, but of the 100 cases sent to the last infringements meeting around 60&percent; were either postponed or dropped,” said one official.