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| ec.europa.eu |
The European Commission has published its 33rd Annual Report on monitoring the application of EU law (click here for the full report; see the press release here). The Commission, as "guardian of the Treaties", monitors the Member States' measures for the implementation and application of EU law to ensure that they comply with EU law. This Annual Report highlights the main developments in enforcement policy in 2015, and gives some facts and figures.
As regards the acquis on consumer protection, the Commission reports that it has raised the implications of the Court of Justice's case law based on the principles of ex officio control by national courts, equivalence and effectiveness with individual Member States, in 'EU Pilot dialogues for non-compliance' and in infringement procedures (pp. 7-8). These mainly concerned the transposition of the Directive on alternative dispute resolution (see also p. 15) and the Consumer Rights Directive. In its press release, the Commission proudly refers to the online Single Market Scoreboard, which monitors the performance per Member State in a number of policy areas and governance tools. Taking all evaluated areas into account, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Ireland and Slovakia performed best in 2015.
In addition, the Annual Report mentions that the Commission received less complaints about potential breaches of EU law than in 2014 (p. 17). The three Member States against which the most complaints were filed were Italy, Spain and Germany. Many of those complaints were related to justice and consumers (p. 18). On its website, the Commission has published - among other things - National Factsheets for all Member States, containing graphs per country on EU Pilot files and infringement cases. These factsheet also refer to some key preliminary rulings of the Court of Justice per country. For example, for Spain, the Court's BBVA judgment of 29 October 2015 (reported by us here) is briefly summarised.
