The European Commission yesterday said that, over the last six months, Malta has managed to reduce its backlog of outstanding EU directives to be transposed into national laws to just 0.9 per cent, achieving its best result since joining the EU in 2004.
According to its latest Internal Market Scoreboard, which measures the progress made by EU member states in the transposition of EU directives, the EU executive said that, by last November, Malta had only 15 pending directives to transpose, managing to reach two years in advance the one per cent deficit target agreed by member states last March.
In March 2001, EU leaders agreed that member states should improve their transposition rates, setting a 1.5 per cent transposition deficit as an interim target. This was met at the end of 2006. In light of this development, EU leaders decided, in March 2007, that the transposition deficit should be below one per cent by 2009, at the latest.
The internal market scoreboard is published every six months and the latest includes data reaching Brussels by last November 11.
Malta's scoreboard position is now included with the front-runner member states.
So far, the best achievers are Slovakia, Denmark, Latvia and Lithuania, which, until November, had only a deficit of 0.6 per cent. On the other side of the scale, the Czech Republic is considered to be a laggard with a transposition deficit of 3.4 per cent.
The scoreboard also gives information about the quality of the transposition being made by member states. When this is not carried out properly the Commission often opens infringement procedures against member states.
On this front, Malta is not among the high-flyers.
The Commission said that over the past six months Malta increased its number of infringements by seven cases and is now facing 43 infringements. Although these are normally settled technically without any need to refer the issues to the European Court, the Commission said that member states should make sure to lower the number of pending infringements.
According to the scoreboard, the worst EU offender is Italy, facing 134 pending infringements followed by Spain with 113.
The most exemplary is Bulgaria with six pending infringements, although the country only joined the EU at the beginning of 2007.
Commenting on the latest results, European Internal Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy said that on the whole the results achieved were very satisfactory as the EU average of non-transposed directive is now down to 1.2 per cent.
"For the single market to work effectively, its rules need to be applied correctly and on time," the Commissioner said.
EU member states are given two years following the publication of the directives in the EU official journal to transpose them into their law books.