Brussels, 23/09/2010 (Agence Europe) - Member states continue to perform well in writing internal market rules into national law. On average, 0.9% of internal market directives for which the implementation deadline has passed are not currently written into national law, according to the latest European Commission scoreboard. This result is in line with the 1% target set by the European Council in 2007. Nonetheless, the rate of non-transposition is up compared to the scoreboard of the last quarter, which showed an average transposition deficit of 0.7%. “If we want to fully reap the benefits of the internal market, it is essential that European rules aimed at making the internal market work are implemented in member states - in time and properly. Today's scoreboard results show that, although many member states are doing well, some have to make more progress”, Internal Market Commissioner Michel Barnier states in a press release.
In total, 18 member states meet the 1% target. Eight of these states have improved or equalled their transposition deficit (Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Malta, United Kingdom, Slovakia, Slovenia). The nine member states that do not meet the transposition target are: Austria, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal and the Czech Republic. Ireland holds the record for having incurred the most delay in writing internal market legislation into national law. Directive 2003/35/EC on public participation in the development of certain environmental programmes, for example, should have been transposed into the Irish body of law over five years ago!
Over the first quarter 2010, the total number of infringement proceedings in relation to the internal market fell by 2.1% in six months, with 1,229 cases ongoing compared with 1,256 during the last half year. Belgium is the worst achiever with this country being concerned by 111 of the cases underway, of which 21 have come about since the last scoreboard. After Belgium come Greece and Italy with 94 and 92 cases opened against them respectively. Taxation and the environment are the most frequent areas of infringement relating to over half of all infringement proceedings.
Professional qualifications. The Commission throws particular light on the tricky transposition of Directive 2005/36/EC on the transposition of professional qualifications applicable, since October 2007. Austria, Greece and Luxembourg have incurred considerable delay in transposing this directive. The United Kingdom, which receives the largest number of applications (nearly 30,000 units between 1997 and 2008), gives a positive response in over 70% of the cases. By way of comparison, the rate of positive responses is around 50% for Germany (7,940 applications) and France (2,182 applications). (M.B./transl.jl)