EU: The European Court of Justice (ECJ) was yesterday recommended to impose a fine of €115.5 million on France for a persistent failure to comply with one of its judgments. If the advice is followed, the case would set a legal precedent for punishing national governments that defy EU rules.
The threat is prompted by France's failure to enforce EU rules on fishing conservation over a period of 20 years. The judges are invited to require a further €58 million from France for every six months that it remains in breach of EU law.
The recommendation from an advocate general of the ECJ, if followed by the judges, stems from a judgment of the court 13 years ago.
The European Commission had brought a case complaining that between 1984 and 1987 France had failed to carry out controls aimed at ensuring its fishing fleet complied with EU conservation rules. In its 1991 judgment the court agreed with the commission that France had failed to enforce controls on minimum mesh sizes of nets (intended to allow smaller fish to escape) and on the minimum size of fish that could be sold.
Following that judgment the commission pressed France to improve its enforcement. But in 2002, after EU inspectors had found further breaches at French fishing ports, the Commission returned to the European Court of Justice. It asked the court to find France in breach of its earlier decision and to order France to pay €316,500 for every day that it delayed in implementing the judgment. The fine it sought would apply from the date that the second judgment was delivered.
But the advocate general is recommending that the court go a step further and impose a retrospective fine.
He argues that if the daily fine only applied after the second judgment, a national administration would have no incentive to end an infringement as soon as possible but could continue to infringe EU law until the second judgment imposing a fine was passed.
In the advocate general's view, which is not binding on the judges, the "persistent, serious, and structural nature of the infringement" justifies a lump-sum fine arrived at by multiplying the proposed daily rate by 365 days.
Ireland has never yet been subject to a daily fine for persistent non-compliance.