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Friday 22 July 2011

Quality of legislation and the European Parliament

Quality, or lack of, in European legislation was an issue explored by the European Parliament in a public hearing held on 21 June 2011. The hearing revealed that the Commission's move from Better Regulation to Smart Regulation may be pre-mature. EU legislation continues to be bad, simply accepting this and moving to measures of post legislative scrutiny will not solve the problem. A better approach would be to run both agendas in parallel, and address both the problem of quality, and the problem of lack of post legislative scrutiny.

4 comments:

  1. 1. I am probably the only person in the world who thinks that EU legislation is actually of quite high quality, considering the political constraints under which it is produced, not to mention the linguistic issues.
    2. Even if I am in my normal position of minority of one on that, I strongly agree that the most important focus is on practical post-enactment scrutiny, rather than on theoretical-level exercises in quality.

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  2. Daniel, it is difficult to have an objective view on this one since I suspect neither you nor I understand the quality of EU legislation in Slovakian, Bulgarian and other EU minority languages. Remember that all documents are produced in the basic 4-5 languages and then they are translated into all the other languages from these - a bit like the simultaneous translation where for difficult combinations, eg from Finnish to Greek, the translator is likely to simply translate from English or French. I have listened to absolutely nonsensical translations into Greek and I have read very badly translated/drafted documents. Perhaps what you are suggesting is true for the English language versions of the documents.

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  3. Dear all,
    I wish that you are ok! I am from the Republic of Kosovo with jobs in the Ministry of Justice, namely in the drafting of legislation.
    I expect the cooperation and exchange of experiences with you.
    Any good
    isufi

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