EU Services Directive: Transposition (Sweden and Finland)

The member states of the European Union have had three years to turn the EU’s Services Directive 2006/123 into national law. But with the transposition period drawing to a close in a few days, on 27 December 2009, a majority of the countries have still not reported on the needed execution measures, if we look at what the EU web pages tell us.

No national execution measures have been reported (or updated) with regard to Sweden and Finland, but is the situation on the ground as bad as it looks?


Commission & Eur-Lex



The Commission’s Services Directive News page gives the impression that the transposition record in the EU member states is far from complete, as does the web page on Implementation. The Eur-Lex web page on National Execution Measures contains details on only a minority of the member states.



Issue 56 of Single Market News (2009-4) has an article on the challenging transposition of the EU’s Services Directive and accompanying legislation into national law (page 6-7).

Reported transposition measures may be insufficient, but on the other hand, the updating of the web pages might lag behind, and the situation may not be as gloomy as at first glance.


Sweden

For example, no reference was available on the National Execution Measures page with regard to Sweden, but if we check the Swedish legal data base SFS, we see an Act and a Regulation on services in the internal market, both published 24 November 2009:




Lag om tjänster på den inre marknaden (SFS 2009:1079)



Förordning on tjänster på den inre marknaden (SFS 2009:1078)


Finland


The Finnish parliament adopted the government’s proposal on 3 December and sent its response to the government on 8 December 2009. On 17 December the government remitted the acts to the president for signature into law, so they have been approved although not promulgated as yet (Eduskunnan vastaus 213/2009 – HE 216/2009 vp; Valtioneuvoston yleisistunto 17.12.2009).


In other words, the situation may be better than the impression we get from the EU web pages.



Services Directive

The Services Directive 2006/123:


DIRECTIVE 2006/123/EC OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 12 December 2006 on services in the internal market, published in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) 27.12.2006 L 376/36.




Ralf Grahn



P.S. Read why Julien Frisch recommends Bloggingportal.eu, the multilingual aggregator of euroblogs (18 December 2009).