Scoreboard fever spreads as colleagues copy Vitorino’s ‘name and shame’ approach

Date: 12/10/00

By Simon Coss

JUSTICE and Home Affairs Commissioner António Vitorino appears to have started a bit of a craze. At the end of last October's special summit in Tampere, he announced that he intended to publish a regular 'scoreboard' to show the Union's progress in passing new laws in this area - and now everybody seems to be at it.

Competition Commissioner Mario Monti is planning to introduce a scoreboard on the Union's state aid rules; enlargement chief Günter Verheugen intends to publish regular reports on how the countries currently applying to join the Union are faring in their respective bids; and then, of course, there is Internal Market Commissioner Frits Bolkestein. The directorate-general which he heads has actually been publishing regular updates on member states' progress in respecting the EU's single market rules for three years now and some officials in the department jokingly argue that it is they and not Vitorino who should get the credit for spreading scoreboard fever.

But most experts agree that it is the Portuguese Commissioner's initiative which has made the new 'name and shame' approach popular.

Surprisingly for an institution not renowned for its ability to produce clear and concise documents, Vitorino's scoreboard is actually quite easy to understand. It amounts to fewer than 30 pages and after a refreshingly brief preamble explaining how and why it came about, gets straight down to the nitty-gritty details.

The scoreboard is divided into seven main sections - asylum and immigration, better co-operation between courts in EU member states, the fight against crime, visa policy and the Schengen free-movement agreement, Union citizenship, the war on drugs and external relations - each linked to one of the main justice and home affairs policy areas.

In each section, the Commission lists a series of actions to be taken or laws to be passed, with clear target dates for achieving each goal. The scoreboard is updated every six months and the next version is due out before the end of this month.

Up until now, EU governments all seem to have fared remarkably well in their attempts to meet the deadlines set out in the scoreboard. The Commission and the member states themselves insist this shows that the commitments made at Tampere to give justice and home affairs issues top priority over the coming years are being honoured. But critics say governments made sure well ahead of last

October's summit that the scoreboard would only contain target dates which they could meet with little or no difficulty.

But whatever the reason, the mission of ensuring the Union becomes a real area of "freedom, security and justice", to quote the summit's organisers, does seem to be on course - for now, at any rate.

On the asylum question, moves to make the EU's approach to this thorny issue fairer and more efficient appear to be advancing as planned. New rules may well be in place by the April 2001 deadline set out in the scoreboard.

Ministers rubber-stamped plans to create a European refugee fund at a meeting in Brussels last month and look set to agree measures which would grant temporary protection to large numbers of refugees fleeing to the Union from the world's trouble spots at their next scheduled talks in December. Both of these initiatives were given 'as soon as possible' deadlines in the scoreboard.

The Union's labour ministers, meanwhile, have agreed a package of anti-discrimination measures which were actually put forward by Social Affairs Commissioner Anna Diamantopoulou but are also mentioned in the justice and home affairs scoreboard. The target period for adopting these three initiatives was June-December 2000.

On the question of better access to justice, discussions designed to encourage EU member states to respect each others' court rulings are also proceeding swiftly, in line with the 2000 target date.

Efforts to co-ordinate the fight against crime have advanced, with a plan to set up a European Police College scheduled for adoption in December. Work on creating a network of Union public prosecutors called Eurojust is also going well and should be completed on schedule by the end of 2001, according to experts.

In addition, ministers are set to discuss plans to tighten up EU rules on money laundering at special talks with their counterparts from the Union's economic and finance ministries next Tuesday (17 October). This initiative has an 'as soon as possible' deadline for adoption.

But while efforts to pass the legislation set out in the

Tampere scoreboard are progressing well, the real justice and home affairs challenge for EU governments is yet to come.

The single market experience has shown most problems arise not when ministers adopt Union laws in Brussels, but when they try to convert them into national legislation. Nearly a decade after the internal market was supposed to have been completed, for example, not one member state has yet translated all the relevant directives into national law.

Many seasoned EU observers predict Tampere's much-trumpeted area of freedom, security and justice could be an equally long time coming.