Liberals target compliance with EU laws

The leader of the 89-strong Liberal group in the European Parliament will mount a fresh bid after the summer break to improve transparency about how member states transpose EU law into national legislation.

Graham Watson, leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), is planning a campaign to win support across the EU and across the Parliament's political groups to pressure EU governments to publish "conformity tables". This would allow EU legislation being transposed to be compared with the resulting domestic legislation.

Watson has already raised the issue with Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen and will write to Liberal members of EU governments, asking for their support. He will also lobby leaders of other political groups in the Parliament for their backing.

The campaign is intended as part of efforts to improve transparency by monitoring member states' attempts to toughen up or extend legislation decided at EU level when it is incorporated into national law.

One Parliament official said: "One benefit would be greater transparency over which laws really do come from Brussels and which are the result of 'gold-plating'," a reference to the practice of member states imposing additional burdens.

He added that publishing such tables would help parliamentary committees scrutinising EU legislation, the media and campaign groups to "see how national civil services interpret broad objectives of EU directives into specific national provisions".

Transposing EU law into national legislation can produce up to 300 different legal interpretations as directives and other instruments are dealt with by national and regional governments.

National legislation which imposes stricter burdens than the original EU law intended is found most often in the fields of environment, food safety and the internal market.

There was an agreement between the Council of Ministers, the Commission and MEPs in 2003 on improving legislation which aimed to make it compulsory for all member states to publish concordance or conformity tables and communicate transposing measures to the Commission.

But from 2004 some member states began to raise concerns about the legal implications of the obligation to publish these tables. At the Council's insistence, references to member states' obligations were no longer inserted into the text of legislation. Instead, a reference to the agreement between Council, Commission and Parliament was included which merely "encourages" member states to draw up tables which will "illustrate the correlation between the directive and transposition measures and to make them public".

A report by Greens/ EFA joint leader Monica Frassoni on monitoring the application of community law said that a "specific clause obliging member states to draft a concordance table when transposing EU directives should be inserted systematically into each newly adopted directive".

The leader of the 89-strong Liberal group in the European Parliament will mount a fresh bid after the summer break to improve transparency about how member states transpose EU law into national legislation.

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