The Court of Justice of the European Union has ordered Greece to pay a lump sum of €3.5 million for having been slow in implementing EU law on the protection of waters against nitrate pollution from agricultural sources in a judgment delivered on Thursday 27 February (Case C-298/19).
In April 2015, the Court found Greece to be in breach for the first time (Case C-149/14). The Greek authorities had failed to designate as vulnerable zones several areas - including the Plain of Thessaly and the river Evros - characterised by the presence of bodies of surface water and groundwater affected by concentrations of nitrates above 50 milligrams per litre and/or by the phenomenon of eutrophication. They had not, therefore, established action programmes relating to those zones.
Greece had thus violated the Directive (91/676) on the protection of waters against pollution caused by nitrates from agricultural sources.
In monitoring the implementation of the 2015 judgment, the Commission noted that compliance with the requirements of the judgment was still lacking and brought a fresh action for failure to fulfil obligations in April 2019.
Since then, Greece has taken all the necessary measures to comply with this judgment, which entered into force in May 2019. The Commission decided to pursue its action only so far as concerns the request for payment of a lump sum.
In its judgment, the Court declares that Greece failed to fulfil its obligation to comply with the judgment of 2015 since it had not adopted the measures necessary for compliance with that judgment on the expiry of the deadline set by the Commission, which was the beginning of December 2017.
Since no action programme envisaged in the directive was adopted within the required period, the Court also considers that Greece's order to pay a lump sum is justified.
As regards the calculation of the amount of the lump sum to be imposed, the Court finds that the infringement alleged against Greece persisted for more than four years between the date of the judgment of 2015 and the date of entry into force of the interministerial decree in May 2019. The Commission further notes that the infringement of environmental protection is particularly serious. It also rejects Greece's argument that, until the adoption of the interministerial decree, the zones in question enjoyed sufficient protection.
For all those reasons, the Court considers it appropriate to order Greece to pay a lump sum of €3.5 million in order to prevent the future repetition of similar infringements of Union law.
See the judgment of the Court: https://bit.ly/2VubGiW (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)