Speed of EU legislation: Audiovisual Media Services Directive

In the comments section of a blog post of his, Julien Frisch mentioned ‘the speed of legislation’. This tied in nicely with the Grahnlaw series on the birth of the AVMS Directive 2007/65, a fairly typical legislative process in the European Union, I would say.



The blog post EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive proposal: Structure and essentials (6 January 2010) described how the Commission’s proposal was constructed and related the main substance of the proposed amending Diretive.



The Commission proposal COM(2005) 646 final tells us that the first consultation round was launched in 2003, followed by a Communication and hearings, leading to the 13 December 2005 proposal.



The web page of the procedure file COD/2005/0260 on Oeil, the Legislative Observatory of the European Parliament, tells us that the legislative process contained i.a. committee work and a first reading position by the EP, a modified proposal by the Commission and a common position by the Council, followed by a Commission communication on the common position, which paved the way for the Parliament’s second reading position.

The final amending Directive was adopted 11 December 2007 and published in the Official Journal 18 December 2007.

However, this was not the end of it. The EU member states were given two years from publication to adopt the necessary measures to turn the AVMS Directive into national law; the so called transposition date was 19 December 2009.

This was not a groundbreaking legal act, but an amending Directive. From launch to effect, the legislative procedure(s) lasted between five and six years, almost the time it takes a human to progress from womb to school.




Ralf Grahn



P.S. Jon Worth may be young of age, but in the euroblogosphere he is one of the grand old men, debating European issues across national borders. His professionally designed blog is listed among the more than 500 great euroblogs on multilingual Bloggingportal.eu, a useful one-stop-shop for fact, opinion and gossip on European affairs, i.a. politics, policies, economics, finance and law.