The implementation and enforcement of European union law in small member states

Abstract

This book is the result of an academic project to study the impact of EU law on Maltese law, undertaken by the Department of the European and Comparative Law within the Faculty of Laws of the University of Malta. The project was closed in October 2020 and does not take into account developments that occurred after this month. The main objective of this work is to examine how the legal order of Malta, which is the European Union’s smallest Member State, manages to cope with the obligations of the EU’s acquis communautaire. As far as the legal obligations are concerned, it does not make a difference whether you are from a Member State of around half a million or a Member State of over 80 million people. Smaller Member States have the same obligations as the largest Member States, yet they have to meet these same obligations with very fewer resources. This work looks at the marriage between Malta’s legal order, which is a mixed legal order based mainly on the civil law tradition but heavily influenced by the common law tradition. It examines how the Maltese legal system manages to fulfil its obligations both in terms of the primacy of EU law, as well as how the substantive European Union law is transposed and implemented. It also examines on how Maltese courts look at EU law and how they manage or not manage to enforce it within the context of national law. The first chapter deals with the relationship between EU law and the Maltese constitutional order, which is mainly based upon the Westminster model. It then looks at how substantive EU law, mainly through directives, is implemented into Maltese law. This is followed by some case-studies dealing with specific examples on the implementation of substantive law into the Maltese legal system such as Consumer law, Company law or Criminal law, among others. This work can serve as a model to demonstrate how EU law is being implemented in the EU’s smallest Member State and can serve as a basis to study the effectiveness of European Union law into the domestic law of its Member States in general.