Keywords

Summary



Keywords

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1. Acts of the institutions ° Choice of legal basis ° Criteria ° Practice of an institution ° Lack of relevance having regard to the rules of the Treaty

2. Commission ° Gathering of information necessary to carry out its tasks ° Council regulation obliging Member States to draw up harmonized business registers to that end ° Legal basis ° Article 213 of the Treaty ° Ancillary effects on the operation of the internal market ° Lack of effect

(EC Treaty, Art. 213; Council Regulation No 2186/93)

3. Community law ° Principles ° Proportionality ° Scope ° Infringement as a result of Regulation No 2186/93 requiring Member States to draw up harmonized business registers ° None

(Council Regulation No 2186/93)

Summary

1. In the context of the organization of the powers of the Community, the choice of a legal basis for a measure must be based on objective factors which are amenable to judicial review. Those factors include, in particular, the aim and content of the measure.

A mere practice on the part of the Council cannot derogate from the rules laid down in the Treaty and cannot therefore create a precedent binding on the institutions where, before they adopt a measure, they have to determine the proper legal basis to that end.

2. Article 213 of the Treaty, under which the Commission may, within the limits and under conditions laid down by the Council in accordance with the provisions of the Treaty, collect any information and carry out any checks required for the performance of the tasks entrusted to it, may, despite the fact that it lays down no rules on voting and does not provide for any right of initiative on the part of the Commission or for the involvement of the European Parliament or the Economic and Social Committee, be used as the sole legal basis for the adoption of an act of the Council.

The Council properly adopted Regulation No 2186/93 requiring Member States to establish harmonized business registers on the basis of Article 213 alone with the aim of enabling the Commission to collect reliable, comparable statistical information with a view to the performance of the various specific tasks conferred on it by the Treaty.

Whilst that regulation also has effects on the establishment and operation of the internal market, those effects are merely ancillary, with the result that Article 100a of the Treaty cannot constitute the proper legal basis for the adoption of the regulation, since the mere fact that an act may have such effects is not sufficient to justify using that provision as the basis for the act.

3. The Council cannot be charged with having infringed the principle of proportionality by requiring the Member States by Regulation No 2186/93 to establish harmonized business registers designed to enable the Commission to collect reliable, comparable statistics.

In order to establish whether a provision of Community law complies with the principle of proportionality, it must be ascertained whether the means which it employs are suitable for the purpose of achieving the desired objective and whether they do not go beyond what is necessary to achieve it. It does not appear that the regulation requires needless information to be gathered, having regard to the requirements for statistics corresponding to the various tasks of the Commission, or that the costs to the Member States of creating the registers are manifestly disproportionate to the advantages to the Community of their existence.