Luxembourg, 21/12/2004 (Agence Europe) - The Fourth Chamber of the European Court of Justice has found Austria (more specifically the Land of Carinthia) guilty of failing to transpose the 1990 EC Directive on the manual handing of loads where there is a risk, particularly of back injury, to workers. The Court points out that a Member State may not plead situations in its internal legal order, including those resulting from its federal organisation, in order to justify failure to comply with the obligations and time limits laid down in a directive. The Austrian government does not challenge the fact that Carinthia has failed to transpose the directive, but argues that Austrian constitutional law prevents the federal state from adopting transposition measures for a directive. This has to be done by the Land itself. Only being found guilty by the Court of Justice gives the federal state the power to transpose a directive when a Land has failed to do so.
The 1990 directive should have been transposed into national law by 1990 for the then Member States of the EU, and on the day of accession for Austria, in others words 1 January 1995. The Austrian government told the European Court of Justice that the regulation necessary to transpose the directive had been planned for the end of 2003 in terms of health and safety regulations for farmers and lumberjacks. The Austrian government explained that for people working for the Land and local authorities, the federal state regularly briefed the Land's competent authorities on safety issues and the Land's authorities would be complying.
Austria made similar arguments in the case regarding the Land of Carinthia, when the Court of Justice found it guilty of failing to transpose the European directive on protecting workers from carcinogens (see Europe of 5 November 2004).