site.btaBulgaria Ranks in Middle of EU Countries in Terms of Community Law Infringements

Bulgaria Ranks in Middle
of EU Countries in Terms
of Community Law Infringements


Brussels, October 1 (BTA correspondent Nikolay Jeliazkov) -
Bulgaria ranks in the middle of the EU countries in terms of
number of open cases of infringement of EU law, according to the
European Commission's 31st Annual Report on Monitoring the
Application of EU Law (2013), which was unveiled on Wednesday.

The report says that 42 infringement cases in Bulgaria remained
open as at December 31, 2013, most of them instituted over bad
application of EU law. Bulgaria, along with Belgium, Estonia,
Romania, the United Kingdom, Cyprus, Poland and Portugal, had an
infringement case referred to the Court of Justice of the
European Union in 2013. The Court of Justice procedure against
Bulgaria was about incomplete transposition of EU rules for the
internal energy market.

The European Commission reported that infringement procedures
have decreased EU-wide in recent years. On the other hand, a
growing number of cases are solved via EU Pilot, a system of
preliminary out-of-court discussions. Infringement procedures
against EU member states dropped from 2,900 in 2009 to 1,300 in
2013. Over the years, most infringements have been in the policy
areas of environment, taxation, transport, and internal market
and services.

Italy had the largest number of infringement cases which
remained open as at December 31, 2013 - at 104, followed by
Spain, 90, and Greece, 79. At the bottom of the table are
Latvia, with 20 cases, Malta, 21, and Estonia, 25. Croatia had
only two infringements, but the country was not an EU member
state until 2013. VI/VE