Out-Law / Your Daily Need-To-Know

EU acts against Member States for failure to implement Directives

07 Jan 2003, 12:00 am

The European Commission is to initiate infringement procedures against several Member States for failure to implement in their domestic laws Directives on e-commerce, electronic money and biotechnological inventions.

The Commission will send reasoned opinions to Belgium, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal, instructing them to implement quickly the E-Commerce Directive.

The Directive requires Member States to create a legal framework to ensure the free movement of "information society services". The deadline for Member States to transpose the Directive into their national laws was January 2002.

Under EU law, Member States receiving reasoned opinions must provide a satisfactory reply within two months, otherwise the Commission has the authority to refer the matter to the European Court of Justice.

The Commission will also send reasoned opinions to Belgium, Finland, France and Greece for failing to amend their domestic laws to comply with two Directives regulating the issuing of electronic money, or e-money.

The Directives establish certain minimum rules to ensure that issuers of e-money are stable and reliable, and to prevent distortion of competition between such issuers and "traditional" credit institutions. The Directives should have been implemented to domestic laws by April 2002.

Also, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain will be referred to the European Court of Justice, after failing to reply to reasoned opinions requiring them to implement the Directive on the legal protection of designs.

The Directive, adopted in 1998, establishes criteria for protection of designs in the Internal Market. Design holders will have the choice to either register their designs under domestic laws as harmonised by the Directive, or use the one-off process of registering them as "Community designs."

Finally, reasoned opinions will be sent to Germany, Austria, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden to implement the Directive on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions into national law.

This Directive aims to clarify certain principles of patent law applied to biotechnological inventions, in order to enable European companies to compete on level terms with their Japanese and American rivals.