Avoidance of Excessive Regulation in the EU

The extent of German environmental and health law that is dictated by Brussels justifies Bavaria taking countermeasures against excessive and misplaced regulatory action at EU level. With its efforts aimed at avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy and administration for government agencies and the business community Bavaria has long been committed to ensure

the consistent application of the subsidiarity principle according to which the EU will only take action in case of tasks with a transnational effect and which Member States cannot solve alone, or when environmental and public health can be better and more efficiently implemented through harmonised EU regulations than with regulations at national levels or in cases where individual action by Member States would lead to a distortion of competition in the common market,
that the EU shall generally refrain from stipulating procedures and shall only pass framework regulations when these are essential for the application and observance of environmental and health laws in all Member States and
that the EU verifies all relevant legal regulations relating to environmental and health are compatible in their systematic approach and terminology.

The Bavarian Ministry of the Environment and Public Health (StMUG) has therefore been participating for some time in the deregulation initiative of the EU Presidency launched in the summer of 2004, because the Laender or federal states are wellpositioned to make useful contributions towards more straightforward and leaner EU law. It is, after all, the regional authorities that are closest to the affected parties in the business community and the society and are the first to hear about undesirable developments, which they can then report in as timely a manner as possible to the authorities in Brussels.

Regulations in the framework directive proposal for the protection of health and safety of employees against hazards caused by physical impact (optical radiation) are an example of such regulatory action in the consumer protection sector. The directive included among other things the provision that employers had to evaluate the health risk for their employees caused by natural radiation (sunlight) and also had to draw up and, if necessary, implement an action programme with protection measures. Bavaria opposed this regulation, the European Parliament also rejected it. The EU will now delete this regulation from the proposed directive and will allow the individual Member States to decide whether regulations for protection against natural radiation are to be adopted and in which form.