Article 7 of Directive 91/671/EEC of 16 December 1991 provides that the Commission shall submit a report on the implementation of that Directive for the particular purpose of establishing whether or not more stringent safety measures and much closer harmonization are needed. The Commission would point out straight away that this report is somewhat late since its deadline had been set at 1 August 1994. Nevertheless, this delay cannot solely be attributed to the Commission's departments. Indeed, in order to write a report that exactly reflected the situation the latter had to have in their possession the transposition texts from all of the Member States by dates that were close to the date of entry into force of the Directive, namely 1 January 1993 (Article 8). However, as can be seen from the table in Annex 1, although the vast majority of the countries introduced the provisions needed either before 1 January 1993, or shortly afterwards, two countries transposed the Directive after a relatively significant time lapse. Owing to this delay in transposition and given the faint that new countries were on the point of acceding to the European Union, the Commission considered it appropriate to await the entry of those new Member States in order to be able to include them in the report and thus present as exhaustive a table as possible, showing the situation throughout the Community. A comparative, updated report on the various national regulations was indeed required before any realistic and objective analysis could be made of the situation in order to provide openings for the future. That is the aim of this report. (A)
Samenvatting