McCreevy names and shames EU market sinners
The European Commission has slammed national governments for their delays in implementing EU internal market laws, with only Denmark, Cyprus, Austria and the UK improving their scores.
According to the latest internal market scoreboard, published by Brussels on Tuesday (18 July), the bloc's member states have worsened their performance compared to last year's results.
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The overall proportion of EU laws behind schedule in terms of getting written into national legislation has risen from 1.6 percent last November to 1.9 percent, with 19 member states increasing their existing backlog.
EU leaders set themselves a goal of 1.5 percent or less for the implementation deficit but just 14 of the 25 countries have achieved this.
Copenhagen is leading the field with the least amount of legislation left-overs - 0.5 percent - which in practise means a delay in eight EU directives, and is followed by Cyprus, Hungary, Lithuania, Slovenia and the UK.
On the other hand, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Greece, Italy and Luxembourg have been highlighted as the worst countries in putting in place EU single market laws.
The new member states are still doing better (1.5%) than the old EU-15 (2.2%), but their efforts have slowed down in the past months.
EU internal market commissioner Charlie McCreevy commented, "I wouldn't like to see that trend continue."
"This isn't some pedantic bureaucratic exercise on our part. When a member state fails to implement laws on time, everyone loses out," he said, adding that the delays mainly harm consumers and firms.
"I think the problem is that in many member states it is not the most important thing on their horizon," noted Mr McCreevy, adding that he finds it "worrying if member states don't think it is important to have a pretty perfect internal market."
The commission's regular six-month monitoring includes a report on how many infringement procedures have been triggered against countries and their incorrect national versions of EU laws.
Among the western European countries, Italy leads with the most difficulties - Brussels has opened 166 cases against Rome.
Spain (114), France (107) and Germany (99) follow suit, while Denmark (29), Finland (40) and Luxembourg (41) feature among the best-performers.
The new member states still record significantly lower numbers of infringement procedures as they only joined the EU in 2004, but Brussels has pointed out that the results in Cyprus (16) and Poland (20) are "very concerning."