FantasticSearch

Implementation and enforcement of legislation The Community will step up efforts at all levels with a view to ensuring better implementation and enforcement of environmental legislation. The priority objectives of the Community shall be:

(a) to improve the legal framework for environmental policy by adopting more coherent, comprehensive and integrated approaches to specific sectors, where appropriate by simplifying legislative and administrative procedures and by using framework directives, and by giving specific attention to the transposability and enforceability of the measures to be adopted;

(b) to step up efforts to ensure that Member States comply more effectively with the reporting requirements under Community legislation, inter alia by better rationalisation and standardisation of such requirements, to make greater use of these reports as a tool in the decision-making process, and to step up the work done in the management committees on these issues;

(c) to aim to enhance the effectiveness of cooperation between the authorities in the Member States responsible for implementation and enforcement of Community environmental legislation, inter alia via the network of environmental inspectors; in this context, to seek to achieve greater transparency as regards supervision and enforcement efforts in the individual Member States, and to step up joint cooperation efforts via the same network by means of pilot projects and exercises on the ground;

(d) to examine options to enhance the effectiveness of environment inspection in Europe on the basis of a report to be presented by the Commission before the end of the Programme and which will assess, in particular, the feasibility of establishing common inspection criteria on the basis of minimum inspection standards; the Commission will publish an annual report on the environment, detailing inter alia the performance of the Member States in implementing and enforcing Community environmental legislation;

(e) to consider means of facilitating greater public involvement in the implementation and enforcement of environmental policies, and to examine whether there is a need for improved access to justice, having regard to the principle of subsidiarity and taking into account the differing legal systems of the Member States;

(f) to encourage, in connection with proposals for the review of existing legislative acts and in proposals for new environmental legislation, provisions requiring Member States to enforce environmental rules and lay down the penalties to be imposed if such rules are breached;

(g) to speed up efforts, at Community and Member State level, to deal effectively with breaches of Community environmental legislation in accordance with the Treaty, in particular Articles 155 and 171 thereof.