Brussels, 30/09/2011 (Agence Europe) - On Thursday 29 September, the European Commission decided to take Spain to the European Court of Justice for poor transposition of EU legislation regarding water. The Commission considers that the Spanish legislative text transposing the water framework directive still contains shortcomings, particularly with regards to plans for managing hydrographic districts. In the Spanish text, a certain number of obligations contained in these plans only apply to hydrographic basins which span a number of regions and not those that are entirely situated in the territory of a given region. The obligations in question mainly concern conditions for granting exceptions, water production for drinking water and monitoring the ecology and chemical make up of surface waters. Spain will therefore have to adopt additional provisions in order to entirely comply with the directive.
The Commission has also sent Madrid a letter of formal notice calling on it to comply with the ruling from the European Court of Justice on keeping wild animals in zoos. In December 2010, the ECJ ruled that Spain was not respecting conditions for granting licences to zoological gardens in a number of regions. Almost a year later, the Commission has still not obtained proof that the system for granting licences is operating as it should do and it still does not know whether the zoological gardens failing to comply with the standards have been closed down. This is behind the Commission's current approach in this connection. (OL/transl.fl)