Member states turn their backs on EU law

Date: 15/09/05

The number of infringement cases that have ended up in the European Court of Justice might suggest a lack of zeal on the part of EU member states when it comes to implementing the Commission's waste directives.

Of all the areas of environmental law, waste is the subject that creates most cases for the courts and most problems for the member states, ahead of nature habitat law and air and water quality law.

According to a Commission scoreboard published last month, the percentage of infringement cases open at the end of 2004, classified by sector, was 25.1% for waste, 24.4% for nature, 16.8% for air, 15.1% for water, 12.3% for environmental impact, 3.3% for chemicals and biotechnology and 3% for others.

But the picture is distorted by the poor performance of a few member states.

Failure to comply with EU law can take various forms: a failure to adopt the national measures required and communicate them to the Commission by a deadline (non-communication); a failure to ensure that the national measures meet the requirements of the EU law (non-conformity), or; a failure to comply with EU law by other action or inaction (bad application)..

Waste-law cases dominate the cases of non-communication, in part because there were recent deadlines for member states to transpose EU law into national law.

Those cases were fairly evenly spread between states.

But of the 24 cases of non-conformity with EU waste law, 11 were brought by the Commission against Italy.

Of the 56 cases of bad application of EU waste law, ten were brought against Spain, nine against Italy, eight against Portugal, seven each against Greece and Ireland, so together five states accounted for almost three-quarters of the cases.

Article reports on the bad or non-implementation of EU legislation on waste in the Member States. According to a European Commission scoreboard only five Member States accounted for almost three-quarters of the cases.

European Commission: DG Environment: Waste: Reporting on implementation of waste legislation http://ec.europa.eu/comm/environment/waste/reporting/index.htm

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