Video : Marco Cappato on Transparency
European Liberal and Democrat group wish to raise public awareness about EU law-making. The process could and should be made more accessible and easier to understand for the general public as well as for all stakeholders, national parliamentary scrutiny committees and the media. Currently EU governments are required to inform the European Commission of their implementation measures when transposing EU directives into national law. Most of them also produce so-called "correlation tables" for internal purposes to help in interpreting EU requirements into national legal provisions. A simple table that compares what is required by the European Union with what a Member State has approved in its implementing legislation is both easy and simple to produce.
The ALDE Group calls on all national governments to publish these tables and improve understanding of EU lawmaking.
See also : ALDE Campaign : Make EU Law in Public
Link : UK Federation of Small Business Report on "Gold Plating"
Link : Letter by Tioulong Saumura to Paul Wolfowitz on corruption
Who makes my law? For transparency in EU law-making
The answer to Brussels bashers
The multi-layered law-making in the EU often leaves citizens and businesses puzzled with the question which actually is the accountable body for a particular piece of legislation. There may as well be a perception problem what comes from the EU and what is done nationally/locally. Most legislation with which for example business must comply still comes from national capitals, rather than from Brussels.
Moreover EU directives may be implemented quite differently from Member State to Member State, particularly if they contain options/exceptions and/or if Member States engage in “gold plating”. In addition, levels of enforcement and market surveillance may differ markedly so that in some Member States rules are enforced strictly whereas in others they are only occasionally enforced, or not at all.
In order to make this process more transparent the Commission decided in June 2003 based on paragraph 34 of the Interinstitutional Agreement "Better Legislation" that all of its proposals for directive should contain a specific provision making compulsory the establishment by Member States of tables illustrating the correlation between the act in question and the transposition measures, as well as the communication of these tables to the Commission. The standard formulation found in the final provisions is: "They [the Member States] shall forthwith communicate to the Commission the text of those provisions and a correlation table between those provisions and this Directive.
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From the beginning of 2004, Council became increasingly opposed to this standard provision and advocated for a non-binding option. The solution supported unanimously in Council was to insert a recital which refers to the interinstitutional agreement on the subject, and to delete the obligation imposed on Member States in the text of the directive.
The Commission, whilst not seeking to block the legislation concerned as a result, has always maintained its objection to the principle of this solution, underlining at the level of COREPER and the Council the importance of including such a provision in the text of directives with a view to the horizontal objective of better legislation.
Better legislation and transparency in EU law-making are key issues for the ALDE Group. Therefore the Group should aim at winning over the support of other Groups to make the request for correlation tables a standard amendment in directives amended by the EP. Further it should convince national parliaments of their good use for monitoring the accurate implementation of EU legislation in national law which will help them in scrutinizing and holding accountable their national governments.
1. Goldplating happens when Member States exceed the provisions foreseen in EU directives when implementing them in national law by tagging additional, unnecessary measures
