In a judgment delivered on Thursday 16 March (case C-174/21), the Court of Justice of the European Union found that the European Commission had not provided sufficient explanations for the lack of measures taken by Bulgaria between April 2017 and February 2019 to comply with a previous judgment (C-488/15) of April 2017 condemning it for infringement of the directive (2008/50) due to the exceedance of limit values for concentrations of the particulate matter PM10.
Bulgaria contests the Commission’s decision to bring action for failure to fulfil obligations before the Court (Article 260(2) TFEU) in order to declare that this Member State has not complied with the previous judgment and to order it to pay a financial penalty until the judgment has been fully complied with (see EUROPE 12615/25).
In its judgment, the Court highlights that, in the context of action for twofold failure to fulfil its obligations, the Commission is obliged to verify, throughout the pre-litigation procedure and before issuing the letter of formal notice, whether or not the judgment in question has been correctly executed in the meantime. It must also establish that the judgment will still not have been executed on the reference date, in this case 9 February 2019.
However, according to the European Court, the Commission did not allege or establish with the requisite clarity that the judgment of April 2017 was still to be executed on the reference date. In its letter of formal notice, the Commission simply states that the shortcomings found up to 2014 in the first judgment have continued for the areas and agglomerations concerned in 2015 and 2016. However, it does not provide a detailed explanation or factual analysis that this situation has continued without significant improvement between April 2017 and February 2019.
The Court therefore concludes that the Commission’s action for twofold failure to fulfil obligations is inadmissible.
See the Court’s judgment: https://aeur.eu/f/5v1 (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)