The Diplomat in Spain

The Grand Courtroom of the CJEU./ Photo: G. Fessy/TJUE

Eduardo González. 19/07/2018

Spain headed, at the end of 2017, the list of EU countries with more cases opened for breach of European laws, as revealed by a report from the Commission.

According to the Annual Report of the European Commission, which monitors compliance with EU law, 716 new infringement procedures were launched in 2017, representing a 27% decrease compared to the 986 infringement procedures launched in 2016. A total of 558 new procedures corresponded to infringements due to late transposition of European laws.

In the case of Spain, last year 27 new infringement procedures were launched, which places our country in thirteenth position in the list of 28 countries of the EU. A total of 16 of these procedures corresponded to by late transposition. Spain appears, in this aspect, in twentieth position. Therefore, the data corresponding to 2017 is not particularly negative for Spain. On the other hand, the chapter in which our country is worse off is that of the procedures accumulated since previous years.

According to the report, at the end of 2017 there were, in total, 1,559 infringement procedures initiated throughout the EU, representing a decrease of 6% compared to the 1,657 procedures of 2016.

Spain is at the top of this list, with 93 open cases, of which 32 correspond to infractions due to late transposition of European directives and the remaining 61 to infractions due to incorrect transposition or bad application of EU Law (Spain is the first the list also in this type of infractions).

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Our country continues to lead in the incorrect transposition or bad application of European standards

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Last February, the Council of Ministers approved an action plan to guarantee, throughout 2018, the transposition of community directives. In 2017, the European Commission tightened the risk of economic sanctions, by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), for those States failing to comply with the compulsory deadlines of transposition of the directives, which has resulted in the overall decrease in procedures across the Union.

According to the Executive – at that time chaired by Mariano Rajoy -, traditionally, Spain had continuously been complying with the transposition objectives established by the European Council, but “during the years 2016 and 2017, the pace of transposition of directives slowed down”. At the time of the approval of the plan there were «23 directives running the risk of fine due to the accumulated delay in the transposition».

Precisely, according to the Commission’s report, Spain was one of the five States (the others are Belgium, Croatia, Slovakia and Slovenia) denounced in 2017 before the CJEU for the imposition of economic sanctions. Specifically, the Court condemned our country to pay three million euros for failling to comply with a 2014 Court judgment on freedom of establishment at Spanish ports. Apart, according to the document, Spain has failed to comply with its obligations under the Waste Framework Directive regarding the operation of 61 illegal waste landfill sites.