Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-09-02-Speech-2-401"
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"en.20080902.32.2-401"2
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"Mr President, I am pleased to be here tonight, although I would have preferred it to have been a bit earlier. Nevertheless it is important that this report be debated in Parliament.
My report further asks the Commission to provide a list naming the Member States whose legislation is not in line with all the provisions of the Working Time Directive and specifying the action it is taking with regard to this. It urges the Commission to take prompt action in accordance with its prerogatives in all cases and in all Member States where the transposition of implementation, or implementation of the existing directives, does not comply with the law laid down by the legislative branch, and indeed the European Court of Justice. I recommend this report to the House.
This report concerns a complaint of maladministration against the Commission. The case has been referred to the European Parliament by way of a special report from the European Ombudsman. Referring a special report to the European Parliament is the last substantive step the Ombudsman may take in seeking a satisfactory response on behalf of a citizen. It is therefore a rare occasion on which reports of this kind are taken here.
My report, on behalf of the Committee on Petitions, endorses the Ombudsman’s conclusion that the failure of the Commission to deal with the petitioner’s complaint within what was objectively established by the Ombudsman as several years’ unjustified delay constitutes an instance of maladministration.
I would emphasise here that this report does not deal with the content of European law but with the manner in which the Commission failed to deal with a complaint, and I therefore want to indicate that I am not accepting the single amendment which has been tabled by the GUE/NGL Group to this report, which seeks to introduce elements relating to the law itself.
In the original complaint to the Commission in 2001, the complainant, a doctor working in Germany, requested that the Commission open infringement proceedings against Germany, arguing that that country infringed Council Directive 93/104/EC, commonly known as the ‘Working Time Directive’. The case was that Germany’s transposition of that Directive insofar as the activity of doctors and hospitals was concerned, in particular as regards time spent on call by these doctors, was in breach of the Directive. In the complainant’s view, this resulted in a considerable risk for both staff and patients.
The Ombudsman found with regard to that compliant that the 15 months it had taken the Commission before it started to deal with the complaint was a case of maladministration.
In the mean time, new German legislation seeking to properly transpose the Directive was put in place, and the Commission informed the complainant that it needed time to examine this new legislation in order to consider its compatibility with Community law and whether or not it had dealt effectively with the complaint that had been made.
Then, in 2004, it informed the complainant that it had adopted new proposals to amend the original Directive, and it would examine the complaint in the light of those proposals. One year later, in 2005, the complainant again had to turn to the Ombudsman to the effect that the Commission was ignoring the Ombudsman’s earlier findings.
There is no evidence, since that proposal was prepared in 2004, that the Commission has taken any further steps in order to proceed with its investigation of the doctor’s complaint. Instead of taking one of two possible decisions – either to initiate formal infringement proceedings or to close the case – the Commission abstained from taking any further action as regards its investigation. Indeed, the fact that the Directive was due for amendment (which, incidentally, has still not occurred – and this is now 2008) is in no way relevant to the complaint. Community law does not envisage the possibility of disregarding existing laws and judgments on the grounds that new rules are being considered and may be introduced."@en1
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