Regulation
Regulation in Europe
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Smart Regulation in Europe: Better Regulation Policy
The law should be more understandable, i.e., clearer and more easily accessible either for legal professionals or lay persons. At European level this principle is an integral part of the EU better regulation policy as of its early origins. The principle of making law more understandable has two distinct dimensions:
drafting good legislation (better law-making), and
improving practical access to legislation by various editorial and technical presentation means (like consolidation, time-versioning, linking, classifying, authoring, etc.) offered by the public online legal databases.
Here, we will stress on the latter only. Consolidation is the most important precondition for making law understandable. There is no need to argue too long about its importance, if we consider for instance the case with the Bulgarian Labour Code, which has been amended 80 times after its promulgation in 1986. It is also obvious that not only a lay person, but an experienced lawyer will need a consolidated up-to-date version of the code, and if the concrete legal case is governed by provisions which are no longer in force, he or she will need in addition a consolidated historic version valid for the specific point in time. The importance of consolidation of EU legal acts was already recognised with the conclusions of the Edinburgh European Council (11 and 12 December 1992). According to the conclusions, consolidation means the mechanical process of regrouping of the diverse fragments of legislation governing a given matter whereby the provisions of the basic act governing a particular matter, and all its amendments are brought together, without any examination or alteration of the text and without the recitals. See Section II of Annex 3 of the conclusions: europarl.europa.eu/summits/edinburgh/default_en.htm. The resulting consolidated text is for information only and has no legal status. In spite of the fact that consolidation does not have any legal effect, it is generally accepted today that it is almost impossible for the layman and the legal professional to access and use EU or national legislation if not published in a consolidated form. The task of making EU law more understandable has been declared as an integral part of the new smart regulation policy of the EU. In Section 2.4 “Making legislation clearer and more accessible” of the Commission communication “Smart Regulation in EU” (COM(2010)543) the Commission confirms its commitment to further consolidate existing legislation and even “encourages Member States to consolidate national legislation which transposes EU legislation and to make it electronically available, including via the EUR-Lex portal”. The Office for Official Publications (OPOCE) is mandated since 1 September 1998 to carry out the consolidation of Community legislation under the control of the inter-institutional Working Group on Consolidation. Next to the impressive consolidation project OPOCE is continuously developing and improving the EUR-Lex web portal (eur-lex.europa.eu/bg/index.htm. See also the new EUR-Lex portal on: https://new.eur-lex.europa.eu/homepage.HTML) as a complex legal information system with various practical functionalities facilitating the access to EU law like links between legal acts (including links between EU legal instruments and case law of the Court of Justice), references to external legal resources (summaries of EU legislation, national execution measures, national case law), browsing of legal documents via several classifiers (subject matter, directory of EU legislation in force, Eurovoc thesaurus, digest of case-law classification scheme), etc. Such complex legal information services in the public domain have been developed also in many EU member states (United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Italy, Austria, Netherlands, Finland, a. o.), thus proving the new role of the state not only for publishing, but also for helping citizens and businesses to understand and apply the law. Source: Eucases
Performance of the overall regulatory environment
The World Bank Group has devised the Doing Business index, which ranks countries according to how conducive their regulatory environment is to the operation of business (see: www.doingbusiness.org). The index averages the country's score on 10 topics: Starting a Business; Dealing with Licenses; Employing Workers; Registering Property; Getting Credit; Protecting Investors; Paying Taxes; Trading Across Borders; Enforcing Contracts; Closing a Business. Le Roux et al (2008), which looked at environmental regulations specifically, who concluded that Scotland has "...a high quality regulatory regime, low costs of compliance for industry and a mixture of moderate to high environmental quality". Also shown in table 4.1 are the admin burden reduction targets. Many of the national targets are broadly in line with the Commission of the European Communities (2007) Action Programme For Reducing Administrative Burdens target of a 25% reduction by 2012. The admin burden reduction targets should be treated as indicative as they do not all use the same criteria, e.g. in terms of policy areas included, or what the reduction is measured against, i.e. relative to a baseline year or counterfactual scenario. Also, it is worth noting that the admin burden reduction targets focus on regulatory quantity but tell us little about regulatory quality, a complex concept based on notions of good governance (for further discussion of regulatory quality see Radaelli and De Francesco (2005)).
Administrative Costs
In 2004 Denmark used the SCM to measure the administrative cost of government regulation. This exercise estimated the administrative cost of agricultural regulation to be 0.14bn euros (Defra 2007). This is equivalent to 6.5% of agricultural production (see table 4.2). In contrast, the UK had the lowest admin cost of the five countries in the study at 1.5%. This difference is likely to be due to differences in regulation and in mix of farming types. However, some caution should be exercised when making comparisons between countries as: "agriculture is difficult to define in this context. The nature of the methodology for reducing administrative costs is that it measures costs based on the activity of a Ministry or government department, rather than on a business sector. The distinction between activities is different in different countries" (Defra 2007, p7). The measurement exercise revealed that 80% of the administrative costs were wholly or partly the result of international obligations (mainly EU) (Danish Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries 2005) compared to 67% in the UK (Defra 2006). In Denmark, the following five orders were responsible for 71% of the total administrative costs:
Order no. 821 of 23 July 2004 concerning direct support to the farmers based on the single payment scheme. Information obligations in this regulation totals yearly administrative costs of 311 million DKK.
Order no. 676 of 16 July 2003 concerning the agricultural use of fertilizer and concerning vegetation during the plan period from 2003 to 2004. The yearly administrative costs for this order total 198 million DKK.
Order no. 892 of 9 October 1996 concerning keeping of log etc. involving yearly administrative costs of 86 million DKK.
Order no. 181 of 19 March 2003 concerning payment of premium for livestock. The yearly administrative costs that are ascribed to the Directorate for Food, Fisheries and Agro Business total 72 million DKK. Another 72 million DKK have been attributed to the Ministry of Family and Consumer Affairs, as a number of other information obligations in the regulation are of veterinary origin.
Order no. 492 of 7 June 1994 concerning spray journals and inspection of spray equipment in agriculture. The information obligations of this order totals yearly costs of DKK 64 million."
(Danish Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisherie s 2005, p5) While this is similar to the situation in the UK, where most of the admin costs result from a small number of regulations, comparison with table 2.5 (see Appendix D) shows that there are differences in the regulations responsible for the admin cost.
Description of Regulation
The Concise Publication of the European Union describes regulation in the following terms: [1] Regulations rank with Decisions and the better known Directives as the key legal instruments of the Eu (see more in this European publication). The difference between them is that Directives have force only when passed into law by each member state, whereas Regulations and Decisions have direct effect, that is, they become law throughout the Union as soon as they have been issued. Historically, Regulations have been the means of implementing the Common Agricultural and Common Fisheries Policies. The Commission intends in future to use Regulations more widely instead of Directives, since it can do so with the easily obtained assent of the Council of Ministers (and, within limits, on its own authority), avoiding the delays and closer scrutiny associated with national parliamentary legislation. (For the volume of Community legislation see Directive and for a general description see Community law.)
Regulation and the European Judicial System
Description of Regulation provided by the European Union Commission: In Community law, a Regulation is an instrument of general scope that is binding in its entirety and directly applicable in all Member States. Regulations can be adopted under the EC Treaty by the European Parliament and the Council or by the Council or by the Commission. Regulations are often used in the field of judicial cooperation in civil matters. They are directly applicable, so they require no transposal into the Member States' domestic law and directly confer rights or impose obligations.
Resources
Popular Topics about European Judicial and European Law
European Judicial Network in Criminal Matters
European Judicial Training Network
European Judicial Atlas in Civil Matters
European Law Students Association
European Law Journal
European Law Institute
European Law Faculties Association
European Law Review
European Law Moot Court Competition
European Law Firm
Resources
Notas y References
Based on the book "A Concise Publication of the European Union from Aachen to Zollverein", by Rodney Leach (Profile Books; London)
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