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“Thus hath the course of justice wheel’d about”*: decided cases

Posted on December 3, 2009 | Filed Under communication technologies 

Today marks the end of the “regulatory holidays”, as the Court of Justice of the European Union decided (in the Case C-424/07 Commission v. Germany) that Germany has failed to fulfil its obligations under Article 8(4) of the Access Directive, Articles 6 to 8(1) and (2), 15(3) and 16 of the Framework Directive, and Article 17(2) of the Universal Service Directive, by adopting Paragraph 9a of the Law on Telecommunications. Under this paragraph, Germany had effectively declared “regulatory holidays” for “new markets” (more details here). I have blogged about the case before here and on the opinion of the advocate general here.

The Court’s judgment is rather straightforward and a very thorough vindication of the Commission’s position. The Court deals with and upholds every single complaint of the Commission and concludes that the German law did indeed restrict the NRA’s discretion more than is permitted by the Framework Directive (and also contravenes the Access and Universal Service Directive).

Today also marks the end of the blogging holidays: after a hiatus of some five months I have decided not to close the blog down completely, but to continue with a lighter schedule and just focus on following the case law developments in European electronic communications. So don’t expect frequent posts, but keep subscribed to the feed if you are interested in the cases decided by the Court of Justice of the European Union (new name - but I guess I can still abbreviate it as ECJ) and the General Court of the European Union (formerly known as Court of First Instance of the European Communities - I have no idea how to abbreviate this Court correctly, so I just started using “GC”).

I have updated the list of pending cases and added a new list of decided cases, linking not only to the judgments, but also to the blog posts here (or, if I didn’t write about the case here, to the blog posts at my German language blog e-comm).

And just as a brief update, I can point you to these cases decided over the past five months:

• C-192/08 TeliaSonera (interconnection requirement, article 4 access directive); judgment of 12 November 2009 see here at e-comm (German);
• C-202/09 Commission v. Ireland and C-211/09 Commission v. Greece (failure to transpose the data retention directive); judgment of 26 November 2009 see here at e-comm (German);
• T-427/04 France v. Commission and T-17/05 France Télécom v. Commission (state aid, annulment of Commission decision C(2004) 3061); judgment of 30 November 2009 see here at e-comm (German);
• T-8/06 FAB v. Commission, T-21/06 Germany v. Commission, T-24/06 MABB v. Commission (state aid, annulment of Commission decision C(2005)3903, aid for DVB-T-introduction in Berlin-Brandenburg); judgments of 6 October 2009.

New opinions of the advocate general are available in these cases:

• C-58/08 Vodafone (is article 4 of the roaming regulation invalid?); opinion of advocate general on 1 October 2009, see here at e-comm (German);
• C-317 /08, C-318/08, C-319/08 and C-320/08, Alassini, Califano, Iacono, Multiservice; mandatory attempt at conciliation (see here); opinion of advocate general on 1 October 2009, see here at e-comm (German).

*) Shakespeare, King Richard III, Act IV, Scene 4

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