Eduardo González
Spain, the country that currently holds the rotating Presidency of the Council of the EU, is at the top in the number of procedures for breaches of Community law.
“Europe is a destination, it is a project, but it is also a task and that means complying with Europe, and Spain is many times weaker and does not take compliance seriously,” said Belén Becerril, professor of European Union Law at the CEU San Pablo University, during the presentation of the report Spain’s European policy: preparation and priorities, prepared by the Elcano Royal Institute under the coordination of researchers Raquel García and Ignacio Molina and which was presented last Thursday in Madrid.
During the recent debate on PP-A and Vox’s intention to regularize irrigation in the natural environment of Doñana in the Andalusian Parliament, “many Spaniards” thought, with “surprise”, that “Spain breached EU law for the first time,” but “it is not like that at all, but rather the opposite,” Becerril continued.
The latest Report on infringements of the European Commission, corresponding to the year 2021 and included in the report, places Spain as the country with the most open infringement procedures and Denmark as the one with the least (among the current members of the EU, since, Curiously, the country with the fewest procedures was the United Kingdom just at the time when its exit from the Union was being completed).
“The latest two reports from the European Commission on compliance with EU law” reveal that “we have improved, but we are still among the worst,” Becerril said. “We have improved; In this summer’s Commission report we are better, and that is very important, especially with Spain now having the role it has”, but that same report, made public in the summer of 2022 but which includes data from 2021, reveals that “of 847 new infringement procedures, 38 were for Spain,” she continued. “We were five countries behind, but if we count the ranking of countries in terms of open procedures, Spain was last, with 105; that is, the Member State with the most open procedures,” she specified.
Likewise, according to “the latest data from this summer, the Commission has initiated 23 infringement procedures against Spain, and if we look again at the open procedures, in December 2022, Spain is the penultimate, with one hundred,” explained Becerril. “There is a worse one, which is Belgium,” she said. This non-compliance, he assured, occurs “in all matters.” “Of the 23 new cases there are everything, social issues, energy, environment, several in the financial sector, several in mobility and transportation issues, or in taxation,” she added.
In the opinion of Belén Becerril, “there is no reason for Spain to be behind, although it is true that it has not always been like this.” The main problem, in his opinion, is “coordination” between the different Government departments. “There is a very important role for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for the Secretary of State for the EU: to draw the attention of the other Ministries,” she warned.
However, “in the end, the issue is the weight of the different Ministries in the Government, the presence of the EU Secretariat of State in the commissions of delegated affairs”, the collegiate bodies of the Government in charge of resolving matters that, affecting more than one Ministry, do not require being elevated to the Council of Ministers. “The Ministry and the Secretariat have to have the instruments and an authority is needed, which has to come from the Government, to express in all the Ministries the relevance of this,” she warned.
According to the Elcano report, “the complexity of the autonomous State has also often been cited as a cause of the high non-compliance with EU Law by Spain, which unfortunately leads in the number of infringements.” However, he warns, “a systematic study of the Reports published by the Commission shows that the cases of non-compliance attributable to the Autonomous Communities are, in percentage terms, scarce.” “Be that as it may, this is one of the most worrying elements when analyzing the institutional bases of Spain’s membership in the EU,” the document states.
