Paris in bid to shed EU laggard reputation

France’s parliament on Friday is voting on plans to fast-track drafting around 20 European laws into the national statute books, in a bid to rid the country of its reputation as the EU’s single biggest legislative laggard.

Year in year out Paris is named and shamed in the European Commission’s ‘single market scoreboard’ as bottom of the class.

The country is on average 14 months behind on transposing EU directives into national law. 101 directives, 54 of which directly concern the single market, are held up in France, and the European Commission has 200 legal infringement cases open against the French government.

France’s finance ministry is particularly worried about the potential cost incurred by the delays.

The country has already fallen foul of the European Court of Justice’s protracted ‘yellow card, red card’ procedure that ends in penalties on one delayed EU directive. If more of the many court challenges reach this final stage Bercy fears Brussels sanctions of hundreds of millions of euros.

But French premier Jean-Pierre Raffarin is also mindful of France’s reputation as one of Europe’s founding members and more particularly Paris’ position as a champion of the so-called ‘Lisbon Agenda’ – a promise made by EU leaders to make Europe the most competitive economy in the world by 2010.

More than 70 EU directives have been drafted to this end, and of the 40 supposed to be transposed already, France has only managed to handle 19.

“This is about France’s credibility in Europe,” one top French diplomat told EUpolitix.com. “How do you expect France to be listened to by its European partners on new initiatives if we are not able to apply community legislation? The political costs are enormous.”

Paris has appealed to its parliament to give the government powers to pass the EU laws into national legislation without parliamentary approval every time.

22 directives have been targetted for this procedural short-cut, mainly in the transport and finance sectors. 12 of them have been subject to delays that have attracted legal challenge from the commission, and one – eight years off schedule - has already resulted in a Brussels victory at the ECJ.

A close adviser to Noëlle Lenoir, France’s Europe minister, told EUpolitix.com that the directives chosen were largely “technical” and uncontroversial.

The national parliament, or Assemblée nationale, has already shaken up its own procedures to try and usher through new EU laws more quickly.

“But this has not been enough” the government insider said. “We have to find other solutions so that the parliament and government can carry on their transposing work without building up further delays.”

Tr. D. Lumsden

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