Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-04-04-Speech-2-194"
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"en.20060404.22.2-194"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I am particularly delighted to take the floor today, not in my usual guise as my group’s representative, but as rapporteur for the Committee on Legal Affairs representing a broader-based majority. As such, I should like to deliver a few messages about this report, the essential aim of which is to emphasise that the implementation of Community law forms an important part of the ‘better lawmaking’ dossier, alongside the other issues that we shall debate this afternoon.
I believe that the policy of naming and shaming with regard to the implementation of Community law is very useful and that the Commission should perhaps help us to apply it more decisively.
Implementation is an important part of law primarily because the situation at European Union level is unsatisfactory, as the Commission’s report points out very effectively. There are very serious problems particularly concerning environmental legislation as well as legislation on the internal market, and responsibility for that – there is no point in denying it – lies above all with the Member States.
Non-implementation is also due, however, to the fact that the procedure is enshrined in the Treaties and is therefore not easy to improve. It is a slow procedure that provides for relatively inadequate sanctions: in order to arrive at a positive solution for the implementation of Community law by the Member States, the procedure often leaves much to be desired and takes a very long time.
I should like to hear whether you believe that this issue of the implementation of Community law is a priority for the Commission or not. Judging from the communication, it does not seem to me that it is, because, as we know, it deals more with the aspect of withdrawing and amending directives rather than their proper implementation.
I believe that there are substantially two schools of thought in the Commission: one that says, ‘It is best to avoid trouble with the Member States, so let us try to solve problems together with them,’ whereas the other says, ‘Let us apply the rules as they are, not inflexibly but at any rate positively, using procedures that as far as possible are fast and within the law.’
I should like to give some examples of that. We believe that several decisions made by the Commission regarding the initiation of certain procedures, such as those on GMOs in Austria, were made particularly quickly and effectively. On the other hand, in the case of France and its inability to implement the Natura 2000 Directive, we have been waiting for three years, ever since the Court of Justice’s decision, for the Commission to intervene under Article 228, which is the article on fines.
Similarly, there are interesting situations regarding the citizens’ right to reimbursement of their medical expenses. This is an extremely important issue for the people themselves, but we realise that it remains unresolved because it is a politically complicated issue to take on. At the same time, Article 228 has only been invoked twice: once for the Greek waste discharge case, which was suspended after a very short time, and once for the Spanish bathing water case, which was withdrawn at the last minute because of an issue that the Commission itself admits is rather dubious from a legal standpoint.
What answer do we give or what proposals do we make to resolve a situation in which we believe that the Commission should act more transparently? First of all we believe that there should be greater surveillance and greater transparency regarding the ways in which Community law is implemented. I think it is important that the Commission pass on to us the compliance studies that it carries out on implementation of the law, which unfortunately we have not succeeded in obtaining.
Secondly, I believe it is extremely important for resources to be transferred from all those bodies that will no longer produce legislation to those that will instead implement it. We do not agree with the idea, for instance, that there should be such a transfer to those who will carry out impact assessments, something that is currently being discussed in the Commission. Thirdly – and this affects us – we believe that the European Parliament should act much more specifically in the area of the implementation of Community law, not in order to change the Commission’s powers – I am aware that this is of great concern to the members of that Institution – but, on the contrary, to gain a clearer idea of what actually happens, as the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety and other committees do."@en1
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