Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-11-03-Speech-3-171"
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"en.19991103.12.3-171"2
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"Mr President, the internal market idea is based on doing business in a competitive environment without confines where the same rules apply for everyone: a level playing field. But I increasingly notice that the interpretation and enforcement of legislation in the internal market differs quite dramatically from country to country. One country enforces nothing at all, whilst in another country enforcement weighs very heavily on industry. Even the understanding of the outcome which needs to be achieved by means of a certain law can be totally different from country to country.
I can list many examples: the fresh meat directive, the liberalisation of telecom, environmental directives or the directive concerning slaughterhouses. Customs offices too interpret EU decisions completely differently. What can be done in one country is completely inconceivable in another. A source of discrepancies are the minimum and maximum harmonisations. On account of the uniform outcome, I would prefer maximum harmonisations in future, such as in the case of the directive on distance selling or even mutual recognition. Any other approach will ultimately lead to a situation which covers so many variations that it will appear as if there has never been an internal market.
The postal services directive will prove my point. In the Netherlands, we naively believe that the directive is one on liberalisation. This is completely refuted by the French Secretary of State. The aim of the directive is to protect public property. This will lead to a situation where the Dutch postal services will be extremely vulnerable to take-overs but the money involved will be earned in a monopoly. Indeed, Commissioner Monti stated that it has never been verified whether the ban on cross-subsidy is observed when making purchases. There can be very harsh penalties indeed for Member States and companies if European legislation is observed. Fair competition is difficult, especially if one time-sharing company observes the legislation but another one does not, for example, and nothing is done about it.
Since this would obviously create an excessive amount of work for the Court of Justice, the Commission is planning to grant national judges power to rule on exemptions within the framework of article 85, para. 3. I can assure you, Commissioner, that judges in Naples and Frankfurt will interpret the article very differently indeed.
I believe in the internal market, but I am very concerned because I am convinced that the market is threatened in its very core by a lack of uniform enforcement. There are too many different transpositions of directives, and as you also point out in your strategy, too many cases of non-transposition and non-enforcement.
You mentioned the SLIM programme, but Commissioner, the SLIM programme is completely ineffectual. Simplified old legislation has a discouraging effect on companies which already comply with old legislation. And what you do is to reward companies which never comply with legislation. I do not think that we could subscribe to this. Besides, SLIM does not even work in itself. Enforcement is the priority."@en1
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