Press Release: Professional qualifications: Commission acts to ensure eight Member States implement EU laws

The Commission decided to refer eight Member States (Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, France, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg and Spain) to the European Court of Justice over their failure to inform the Commission of measures taken to implement Directive 2006/100/EC, which provides for technical adaptations to the Directives on professional qualifications further to the accession of Bulgaria and Romania to the European Union on 1 January 2007. It updates, amongst others, all the lists of qualifications which benefit from automatic recognition by completing them with the corresponding Bulgarian and Romanian qualifications. The deadline for transposing Directive 2006/100/EC expired on 1 January 2007. The Member States in question have still not brought into force all the necessary provisions.