Criminal proceedings against Luciano Arcaro.
Date: 1996-09-26
21 However, according to settled case-law, where questions are formulated imprecisely, the Court may extract from all the information provided by the national court and from the documents concerning the main proceedings the points of Community law needing to be interpreted, having regard to the subject matter of the dispute (judgment in Case 251/83 Haug-Adrion [1984] ECR 4277, paragraph 9).
36 The Court has made it clear that the possibility of relying, before a national court, on an unconditional and sufficiently precise provision of a directive which has not been transposed exists only for individuals and only in relation to "each Member State to which it is addressed". It follows that a directive may not by itself create obligations for an individual and that a provision of a directive may not therefore be relied upon as such against such a person (judgments in Case 152/84 Marshall [1986] ECR 723, paragraph 48, and in Case 80/86 Kolpinghuis Nijmegen [1987] ECR 3969, paragraph 9). The Court has stated that this case-law seeks to prevent a Member State from taking advantage of its own failure to comply with Community law (judgments in Case C-91/92 Faccini Dori [1994] ECR I-3325, paragraph 22, and Case C-192/94 El Corte Inglés, not yet published in the ECR, paragraph 16).
37 In that same line of authority the Court has also ruled that a directive cannot, of itself and independently of a national law adopted by a Member State for its implementation, have the effect of determining or aggravating the liability in criminal law of persons who act in contravention of the provisions of that directive (judgment in Case 14/86 Pretore di Salò [1987] ECR 2545).
41 It should be added that the Member States' obligation, arising under a directive, to achieve the result envisaged by the directive and their duty, under Article 5 of the Treaty, to take all appropriate measures, whether general or particular, to ensure fulfilment of that obligation, are binding on all the authorities of Member States including, for matters within their jurisdiction, the courts. It follows that, in applying national law, the national court called upon to interpret that law is required to do so, as far as possible, in the light of the wording and purpose of the directive in order to achieve the result pursued by the directive and thereby comply with the third paragraph of Article 189 of the Treaty (see the judgments in Case C-106/89 Marleasing [1990] ECR I-4135, paragraph 8, and Case C-334/92 Wagner Miret [1993] ECR I-6911, paragraph 20).
42 However, that obligation of the national court to refer to the content of the directive when interpreting the relevant rules of its own national law reaches a limit where such an interpretation leads to the imposition on an individual of an obligation laid down by a directive which has not been transposed or, more especially, where it has the effect of determining or aggravating, on the basis of the directive and in the absence of a law enacted for its implementation, the liability in criminal law of persons who act in contravention of that directive' s provisions (see the judgment in Kolpinghuis Nijmegen, cited above, paragraphs 13 and 14).