ECHA – EU Law Enforcement

In recent years, the European Union (EU) has become increasingly involved in the enforcement of EU policies. While the institutional arrangements of this involvement vary in different policy areas, it is usually based on shared competences between the European Commission, EU agencies and national enforcement authorities. This ‘supranational enforcement’ appears to be a functional extension to EU regulation. However, in case of the REACH regulation on chemical substances, this extension is not based on formal delegation of competences, but informal practices of the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA). In this blog post, I discuss these practices to demonstrate systemic problems of supranational enforcement in the case of REACH. Due to these problems, there is substantial non-compliance with essential provisions of the regulation.

Continue reading “Problems of informal supranational enforcement: The case of chemical substance registration in the REACH regulation”

The Editors

The editors are Miroslava (Mira) Scholten, Laura Zoboli, Zlatina Georgieva and Kelly Blount. Mira is an Associate Professor of EU law at Utrecht University, a member of the scientific board of Osservatorio AIR, and a member of the Utrecht Centre for Regulation and Enforcement in Europe (RENFORCE). Laura is Assistant Professor at the University of Brescia. Zlatina is Assistant Professor in Competition, Regulation and Enforcement at Utrecht University. Kelly is a former Doctoral Researcher at the University of Luxembourg and a member of the Doctoral Training Unit on Multi-Level Enforcement.