You should consider rewriting existing regulations in plain language when you have the opportunity and resources to do so. The National Partnership for Reinventing Government will issue guidance to help you comply with these directives and to explain more fully the elements of plain language. So there is progress, and it is good to see that the Translation Unit's Fight the Fog campaign is still going strong at EU level. Fog billows up exponentially as more languages use it, so the likely accession of additional member states must make the campaign even more necessary. I want to set out four principles for clear EU legislation, and I hope that later you will suggest some more.
People say legal documents are complex.
So they can be. But more often than not, when you examine the document closely, the complexity arises far less from mysterious ideas but from unusual language, tortuous sentence construction, and disorder in the arrangement of information. In other words, the complexity is mainly linguistic and structural smoke created by poor drafting practices. That is what we are here today to investigate, and I want to start that investigation by asking you to examine a recent piece of EC law, the Safety of Toys Directive.