Community law in 1998

The Commission’s 16th annual report on the application of Community law in 1998, issued in July 1999, has just been published (OJ 7 December). There is no mention of the Official Journal in the report (which is concerned entirely with the Member States), but five months seems an excessive production time. Quite clearly the OJ is suffering staff problems. We have noticed too many misprints and proofing errors over the past year, especially in L series texts. This must indicate inadequate proofreading, and also a lack of conscientious translation checking. As we are continually reminded that the OJ is the only source of authentic texts, this is worrying. As usual, the Commission’s report is full of statistics, bar and pie charts and tables. The number of Art. 169 (now 226) letters to defaulting Member States fell to 1101. But only 123 cases were actually referred to the European Court. This, says the Commission, makes it quite clear that the bulk of infringement cases are solved before there is any need to go to the Court. Complaints from the public rose to 1128, but that did not include the 4,000 or so identical complaints about the new Swedish legislation on parcels containing spirits and tobacco or the hundreds of complaints about the taxes applied by some Belgian municipalities on satellite dishes, which led the Commission to publish a standard-form acknowledgement of receipt both in the OJ and on the web. The complaint form has been revised so that complainants can be fully aware of what they can expect from the infringement procedure. Litigation procedures have been speeded up by dealing with Art. 169 situations at fortnightly meetings, instead of waiting for quarterly periodic reports on suspected infringements. The notification to the Member State concerned of an Art. 169 letter or reasoned opinion is now done within the week instead of taking months.