EU Law Enforcement

Much is being said, lately, regarding the effectiveness of EU policies, often arguing that their implementation is too poor or uneven throughout the Union. Enforcing EU laws is crucial for their successful implementation; however, how should enforcement be organised? At which level, by what type of institutions and what implications does the choice for a particular institutional strategy have in terms of legitimacy, organization of controls and operation of enforcement? The European Commission itself is committed to making EU laws more effective and improving overall compliance with them. What is most relevant is the ongoing changes in the governance of EU law enforcement, according to which direct enforcement powers, long been regarded an exclusive competence of the EU Member States, are increasingly being uplifted at the supranational level, both by providing EU actors with direct powers and through unprecedented shared powers with the lower administrative levels.

Continue reading “Symposium on Institutional Innovations in the Enforcement of EU Law and Policies”

Michiel Luchtman & Miroslava Scholten

With this blog post, the editors of the blog would like to announce the creation of the Jean Monnet Network on EU law Enforcement (EULEN). We would like to sketch briefly the relevance of this topic, thematic scope, structure and plans for activities of the network.

Continue reading “Jean Monnet Network on enforcement of EU law (EULEN)”

This blog post is a follow up to the preliminary outcomes of the international conference “European Union Law Enforcement: The Evolution of Sanctioning Powers”, organised by the Law Department of the University of Turin on 28 and 29 March 2019. The post is also intended to provide an overview of the main contents of the forthcoming publication of the proceedings of the conference (Eds Stefano Montaldo, Francesco Costamagna and Alberto Miglio, European Union Law Enforcement: The Evolution of Sanctioning Powers, Routledge – book series Routledge Research in EU Law – early 2020). Building on the conference, the book presents the state of the art of EU sanctioning powers and discusses paths converging towards its centralisation – at various degrees of intensity depending on the area of EU competence involved – in the hands of European institutions and bodies.

Continue reading “Analysing the changing face of EU sanctioning powers: a conference in Turin (and a forthcoming book)”

Based on: ‘Shared Tasks, but Separated Controls: Building the System of Control for Shared Administration in an EU Multi-Jurisdictional Setting’, EJRR, 2019.

In my first blog post for this blog page, I signaled a rapid proliferation of EU enforcement authorities (EEAs). These EEAs are an example of a growing administration of shared tasks – regulatory and enforcement – in the EU. The establishment of these complex, multi-level governance structures and decision-making procedures is necessary to address “wicked problems” (think, for instance, about the need to protect environment), which require cooperation of and involvement of various stakeholders. Establishing these complex structures and procedures requires in turn sophisticated systems of controls over public power to safeguard the rule of law. How to build such a system? My main argument is that it is through a framework in which a number of elements need to be connected. These elements include:

• relevant concepts of control (accountability, protection of fundamental rights, etc);
• types of controls (political, judicial, etc) that these concepts may represent;
• analytical prisms that they may create (institutional, decision-driven and rights-driven); and
• systems of controls belonging to different jurisdictions/legal orders in the EU (EU-national and national-national).

Continue reading “Shared Tasks, but Separated Controls. How to build a system of control for EU shared administration?”

For many years, the incorrect application of the Single Market rules has been a concern for the EU. In that respect, the European Commission has expressed its ambition, in compliance and enforcement matters, to be “bigger and more ambitious on big things, and smaller and more modest on small things”. Given its limited resources, it makes sense for the Commission to focus on the “big things”. But then someone else has to take care of the “small things” because, added together, they constitute a serious impediment to the functioning of the Single Market.

How, and by whom, these small things shall be taken care of is the topic of our newly published discussion paper “Reforming compliance management in the Single Market”. In this paper, the National Board of Trade Sweden discusses, after looking at possible alternatives, a decentralisation reform that would consist in setting up national enforcement bodies in each Member State. Their mandate would be to investigate local infringements of EU law and, eventually, to bring actions before the national courts.

Continue reading “For a Decentralised Enforcement of Single Market Rules”