In a new report published on Wednesday 28 February, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) found that the European Commission’s annual report on the rule of law, published since 2020, “still lacks a solid foundation”.
It highlights “not only the difficulty of ensuring complementarity and synergies with all the other tools in place, but also the low rate of application of the report’s recommendations in the Member States”, according to a press release.
The annual report presents the European Commission’s assessment of the main developments in the rule of law in EU countries, and its opinion. It covers national judicial systems, anti-corruption frameworks, media pluralism and freedom, and other institutional issues relating to the balance of power.
As this report is not legally enforceable, “sincere cooperation from the Member States is essential”. Since 2022, it has also included recommendations for them.
“We note that between 2022 and 2023, barely one tenth of the recommendations in the report on the rule of law were fully implemented, just over half were at least partially implemented and over one third remained unimplemented”. At the end of the first year of monitoring, 11% of recommendations were implemented in full, 55% were implemented partially and there was no progress on 34 % of them.
The ECA also questions the way in which the Commission considers that recommendations have been implemented. “Another recommendation was deemed to have been ‘fully implemented’ on the basis that the member state concerned (Hungary) had adopted a new law. However, this recommendation had been to strengthen the role of a particular institution - something which may also depend on how this law is implemented in practice”, points out the ECA.
The auditors would like the 2024 edition of the report to improve the tracing of evidence gathered during the evaluation process by better documenting how the European Commission decides which problems to address and how serious they are.
The ECA also points to problems with the rule of law terminology used to classify problems, which differs from that used by other EU tools in this area.
Link to the report: https://aeur.eu/f/b2i (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)