Dependence on enforcement Sample Clauses

Dependence on enforcement. A third, and major, disadvantage of direct environmental regulation is that its effectiveness necessarily depends on effective enforcement - which in turn depends on the government’s resources and enforcement policy of the day. It is fair to describe enforcement of environmental law as the Achilles Heel of contemporary Community environmental policy (though, of course, it is not a problem specific to Community or environmental law).32 As the Community has no “environmental enforcement agency” - proposals to this effect made by some commentators have been vociferously rejected by Member States wary of encroachment on what they perceive as their sovereignty territory - Community direct regulation is dependent for effectiveness on a combination of variables, or conditions of effectiveness. In particular, the effectiveness of such direct regulation depends on: • Member States’ enforcement authorities’ taking action against individual non-complying operators. Such enforcement may be via administrative tools of enforcement (such as withdrawing a permit, or imposing administrative penalties), or via criminal law tools of enforcement. In each case, as the ECJ has long held, the starting point is, in principle, national procedural autonomy: Member States are free to choose how to penalise breaches of Community law, subject to the principles of equivalence (remedies must be equivalent to those for comparable breaches of national law) and effectiveness (remedies must not render the enforcement of Community rights impossible or excessively difficult).33 However, a certain (limited) amount of harmonisation of remedies has taken 31 This may to some extent be remedied by the use of “bespoke” permits, the conditions of which are tailored to the individual operator. The downside of such permits is, however, that costs to the regulator are increased by the cost of negotiating the bespoke permit. See further, Xxxxxx and Xxx, Environmental Protection, Law and Policy (2nd ed., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007). 32 See, for example, Xxx, EU Environmental Law: Challenges, Change and Decision-Making (Oxford, Xxxx, 2005 and Xxxxxx, “Taking Slippage Seriously: Noncompliance and Creative Compliance in Environmental Law” (1999) 23 Harvard Environmental Law Review 297. 33 See, for example, Case 199/82 San Giorgio [1983] ECR 3595. place at Community level.34 The most notable recent example is the agreement on the text of a Directive partially to harmonise remedies by requiri...