Ireland referred to the Court of Justice for failing to implement the Package Travel Directive

12th March 2019 by David Grant

The European Commission has decided to refer Ireland to the Court of Justice of the EU for failing to transpose EU package travel rules (Directive (EU) 2015/2302) into national law.

The Commission will call on the Court to impose the payment of the lump sum based on a daily amount of €3,808.80 with the minimum lump sum of €1,181,000 and a daily penalty of €15.996,96. The penalties are calculated by taking into account the seriousness and the duration of the infringement, as well as the Member State’s capacity to pay and its institutional weight.

In November 2015, Member States agreed to transpose EU rules into national law by 1 January 2018 and to be brought into force by 1 July 2018. In March 2018, the Commission opened infringement proceedings by sending a letter of formal notice to Ireland, followed by a reasoned opinion in November 2018. To date, Ireland has still not notified the full transposition of the Directive into its national law. Therefore, the Commission decided to refer the case to the Court of Justice of the EU.

In practice, under Article 260(3) of Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU) if a Member State fails to comply with an obligation under EU law, in this case by not transposing a Directive adopted by the EU legislator into national law within the required deadline, the Commission may call on the Court of Justice of the EU to impose financial sanctions. When specifying a financial sanction, the Commission takes into account:

The seriousness of the infringement;
The duration of the infringement;
Special “n” factor (which varies between Member States and takes into account their Gross domestic product, GDP, in millions of euros and number of seats of the Member State concerned in the European Parliament);

The financial sanctions proposed by the Commission consist of a lump sum payment (to penalise the existence of the infringement itself), and a daily penalty payment (to penalise the continuation of the infringement)

[Source: European Commission, 7 March 2019]

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