In a judgment handed down on Thursday 27 March (Case C-515/23), the Court of Justice of the European Union has ordered Italy to pay financial penalties until it fully complies with a previous judgment from April 2014 (Case C-85/13), which found that urban wastewater was not being properly collected and treated in 41 agglomerations in that Member State.
Considering that, more than twenty years after the expiry of the transposition deadlines for Directive 91/271 on urban waste water treatment and nine years after the 2014 judgment, Italy had still not fully complied with European case law for five agglomerations - Castellammare del Golfo I, Cinisi, Terrasini, Courmayeur and Trappeto - the European Commission brought a new action for failure to fulfil obligations aimed at imposing financial penalties. In Trappeto, construction work on a wastewater treatment plant has since been completed.
In its judgment, the Court of Justice ordered Italy to pay a lump sum of €10 million and a penalty payment of €13.7 million for every six months of delay in implementing the measures necessary to fully comply with the 2014 judgment. It stresses in particular that the lack of urban waste water treatment constitutes a particularly serious threat to the environment, especially since the discharges from the agglomerations concerned flow into sensitive areas.
See the judgment of the Court of Justice of the EU: https://aeur.eu/f/g59 (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)