Enforcement In The Eu Single Market

Enforcement of, and compliance with, laws and regulations in the single market of the European Union are of crucial economic importance for business, consumers, and the EU economy at large. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the current EU enforcement landscape. The traditional method of regulation enforcement, trying cases of infringement in the Court of Justice of the European Union, remains critical as a last resort, but it is increasingly seen as being very slow and costly. The authors reveal that EU law enforcement now relies heavily on a range of preventive initiatives to keep technical issues from developing into infringement problems. These measures tend to be quicker, far less costly, less formal, and highly effective in maintaining a properly functioning internal market. While these improvements are welcome news for the single market, the authors caution that EU enforcement still has thorny problems to resolve in areas such as public procurement.

Retail is ‘going digital,’ and grocery shopping is no exception. While some businesses are relaying on their corporate website to make the sale, both traditional brick-and-mortar and new disruptive business models are increasingly using online marketplaces to offer their products online. European Union law has been gradually updated to reflect this new reality, with Intellectual Property Rights legislation and Consumer Law leading the way toward a suitable regulatory framework in the Platform Economy. However, the EU has not devised a comprehensive strategy for tackling the challenges posed by the online sale of physical consumer goods, such as effective public enforcement in online environments. In fact, sector-specific legislation, including Food Law, largely ignores online transactions. In this context, the book evaluates the impact that online marketplaces are having on European Union sector-specific legislation and its e-nforcement. The goal is to assess whether the existing regulatory and policy framework are sufficient for promoting compliance and bridging the enforcement gap in the digital single market. Focusing on the e-food market, the book presents a state-of-the-art overview of how online marketplaces are altering EU law and its enforcement by public authorities.

It is clear that the current crisis of the EU is not confined to the Eurozone and the EMU, evidenced in its inability to ensure the compliance of Member States to follow the principles and values underlying the integration project in Europe (including the protection of democracy, the Rule of Law, and human rights). This defiance has affected the Union profoundly, and in a multi-faceted assessment of this phenomenon, The Enforcement of EU Law and Values: Ensuring Member States' Compliance, dissects the essence of this crisis, examining its history and offering coping methods for the years to come. Defiance is not a new concept and this volume explores the richness of EU-level and national-level examples of historical defiance – the French Empty Chair policy–, the Luxembourg compromise, and the FPÖ crisis in Austria - and draws on the experience of the US legal system and that of the integration projects on other continents. Building on this legal-political context, the book focuses on the assessment of the adequacy of the enforcement mechanisms whilst learning from EU integration history. Structured in four parts, the volume studies (1) theoretical issues on defiance in the context of multi-layered legal orders, (2) EU mechanisms of acquis and values' enforcement, (3) comparative perspective on law-enforcement in multi-layered legal systems, and (4) case-studies of defiance in the EU.

Globalisation and technological innovation have been fuelling the need for increasing levels of trust in private actors, such as companies or special interest groups, to regulate and enforce significant aspects of people's daily lives: from environmental and social protection to the areas of food safety, advertising and financial markets. This book investigates the trust vested in private actors from the perspective of European citizens. It answers the question of whether private actors live up to citizens' expectations or whether more should be done as to the safeguarding of citizens' interests. Several cross-cutting studies explore how private regulation and enforcement are embedded in EU law. The book offers an innovative approach to private regulation and enforcement by focusing on the specific EU context which, unlike the national and transnational ones, has not yet been widely explored. This context merits a stand-alone analysis because of the unique normative framework of the EU, as a particular polity itself but also in relation to its Member States. With an overall analysis of the main aspects of private regulation and enforcement across different policy fields of the EU, the book adds a missing tile to the mosaic of public–private governance studies.

The existence of a structured enforcement system is an inherent feature of national legal orders and one of the core elements of State sovereignty. The very limited power to issue sanctions has often been deemed a gap in the EC legal order. Over the years, the situation has progressively changed. The Union’s institutional setting is growing in complexity and a variety of agencies has been or is expected to be endowed with law enforcement responsibilities. In addition, the so-called competence creep has led the EU to play an increasingly prominent role in several areas of EU law enforcement, including the issuing of sanctions. This book examines these developments, focusing on both the general features of the EU legal order and the analysis of key-substantive areas, such as banking and monetary union, environmental law, and data protection. The work thus presents a general framework for understanding EU sanctioning based on structural features and general legal principles. Part I develops an analytical framework, tracking the most significant evolutive patterns of EU sanctioning powers. Part II adopts a more practical approach focusing on specific issues and policy areas. The book bridges a gap in existing literature and sheds new light on the relationship between the exercise of jus puniendi and the evolution of EU integration.

EU law and governance have faced a new development – the proliferation of EU enforcement authorities, which have grown in number over the last 15 years. These entities, either acting alone or together with national enforcement authorities, have been investigating and sanctioning private actors on their compliance with EU law. Law Enforcement by EU Authorities investigates whether the system of control (in terms of both judicial and political accountability) has evolved to support the new system of law enforcement in the EU.

This book explores how the EU’s enforcement of competition law has moved from centralisation to decentralisation over the years, with the National Competition Authorities embracing more enforcement powers. At the same time, harmonisation has been employed as a solution to ensure that the enforcement of EU competition rules is not weakened and the internal market remains a level playing field. While employing a comparative law argument, the book, accordingly, analyses the need for harmonisation throughout the different stages of development of the EU’s competition law enforcement (save Merger control and State Aid), the underlying rationale, and the extent to which comparative studies have been undertaken to facilitate the harmonisation process from an historical perspective. It also covers the Directives, such as the Antitrust Damages Directive and the ECN+ Directive. Investigating both public and private enforcement, it also examines the travaux préparatoires for the enforcement legislation in order to discover the drafters’ intent. The book addresses the European and the Member States’ perspectives, namely, the Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, as harmonisation proceeds through dialogue and cooperation between the two levels. Lastly, it explores the extent to which harmonisation of the competition law enforcement framework has been accepted and implemented in the Member States’ legal systems, or has led to the fragmentation of the national systems of the CEE countries.

This book provides an overview of recent and future legal developments concerning the digital era, to examine the extent to which law has or will further evolve in order to adapt to its new digitalized context. More specifically it focuses on some of the most important legal issues found in areas directly connected with the Internet, such as intellectual property, data protection, consumer law, criminal law and cybercrime, media law and, lastly, the enforcement and application of law. By adopting this horizontal approach, it highlights – on the basis of analysis and commentary of recent and future EU legislation as well as of the latest CJEU and ECtHR case law – the numerous challenges faced by law in this new digital era. This book is of great interest to academics, students, researchers, practitioners and policymakers specializing in Internet law, data protection, intellectual property, consumer law, media law and cybercrime as well as to judges dealing with the application and enforcement of Internet law in practice.