November 12, 2002	Tuesday	Ramazan 6, 1423

BRUSSELS, Nov 11: European Union governments are failing to enforce the EU’s single market and are falling behind with translating the single market’s rules into national law, the European Commission said on Monday.

Ten years after launching the single market to free up the movement of workers, goods and services within the EU, the Commission said it knew of 1,505 cases where national laws in the bloc’s 15 member states did not comply with the rules.

The number of laws failing to meet single market standards remained “stubbornly high”, with France and Italy accounting for nearly 30 per cent of the total, the Commission said. Only Denmark had met the target of a 10 per cent cut in non-compliant laws.

European Internal Market Commissioner Frits Bolkestein said in a statement that there were still loopholes to plug and barriers to dismantle in the common market’s legal framework.

“I am rather alarmed that the positive trend on implementation over the last 10 years seems in danger of being reversed,” he said.

France also took the wooden spoon in another measure of its determination to pass single market rules into its national laws. It had agreed with other EU governments to aim to have 98.5 per cent of single market laws in place by spring 2003.

The Commission said only five states had met the goal and, for the first time, the backlog of unpassed laws had grown. France still had 95 EU laws outstanding, or 3.8 per cent of the total, the Commission said.—Reuters