Brussels, 14/04/2009 (Agence Europe) - On Tuesday 14 April, the European Commission opened or continued a number of infringement procedures against Germany, Spain, Greece and Luxembourg in the area of professional qualifications.
Article 228 procedures. (1) The Commission has sent Spain a letter of formal notice asking it to provide information on measures taken to comply with the Court of Justice judgment of 16 October 2008 (C-136/07), in which the Court ruled that Spain's legislation on the recognition of air traffic controller qualifications failed to comply with Council Directive 2005/36/EC on the recognition of professional qualifications. Furthermore, Spain has still not transposed Directive 2006/23/EC on a Community air traffic controller licence. (2) In October 2008, the Court ruled (in case C-274/05) that Greece was infringing directive 2005/36/EC by refusing to recognise diplomas, in particular for engineers, awarded by other member states. Athens will receive a letter of formal notice from the Commission calling on it to provide information on the steps taken to come into line with the directive. (3) Luxembourg will also have to inform the Commission of all the measures it has taken to comply with Court ruling (case C-223/08). This judgment found the Grand Duchy had failed to transpose directive 2006/100/EC which provides for technical adaptations to the directives on professional qualifications further to the accession of Bulgaria and Romania to the European Union. Bulgarian and Romanian citizens whose professions are regulated at European level are still subject to “needlessly bureaucratic and slow procedures” before being able to exercise their right to work, the Commission says in a press release.
The Commission is also to send a reasoned opinion to Germany calling on it to amend its legislation which does not recognise the qualifications of manual therapists (osteopaths, chiropractors, physiotherapists, etc) obtained by European citizens in other member states. German authorities cannot, the Commission says, make reimbursement of fees paid by patients subject to the condition that the manual therapist has completed a postgraduate training course. European law does, however, allow Germany to make the recognition of a qualification obtained in another member state conditional on passing an aptitude test or on fulfilling a supervised adaptation period if the training requirements in the other member state are substantially different from its own training requirements. (M.B./transl.rt)