Page 189 - Секретаријат за законодавство

set out the objective to be attained. Those decisions which are addressed to
Member States may in fact have legal nature similar either to the directive
or regulation. In some cases, such decisions set out obligations to Member
States and they require transposition, as directives. In other cases the de-
cisions can be fully directly applicable as regulations requiring only some
actions from the Member States in order to ensure full implementation
(nomination of responsible body, sanctions). In majority of cases decisions
should be carefully checked on a case by case basis whether transposition
is needed or they could be directly applied with no further action needed.

The case law of the Court of Justice of EU provides for extensive clar-
iÞcations with regard to the issue of direct effect of decisions:

“…although it is true that by virtue of Article 189 [currently Article
288 TFEU], regulations are directly applicable and therefore by virtue
of their nature capable of producing direct effects, it does not follow
from this that other categories of legal measures mentioned in that
article can never produce similar effects. In particular, the provision
according to which decisions are binding in their entirety on those to
whom they are addressed enables the question to be put whether the
obligation created by the decision can only be invoked by the Com-
munity institutions against the addressee or whether such a right may
possibly be exercised by all those who have an interest in the fulÞl-
ment of this obligation. It would be incompatible with the binding
effect attributed to decisions by Article 189 to exclude in principle the
possibility that persons affected may invoke the obligation imposed by
a decision. Particularly in cases where, for example, the Community
authorities by means of a decision have imposed an obligation on a
Member State or all the Member States to act in a certain way, the
effectiveness (‘l’effet utile’) of such a measure would be weakened
if the nationals of that State could not invoke it in the courts and the
national courts could not take it into consideration as part of Commu-
nity law. Although the effects of a decision may not be identical with
those of a provision contained in a regulation, this difference does not
exclude the possibility that the end result, namely the right of the in-
dividual to invoke the measure before the courts, may be the same as
that of a directly applicable provision of a regulation”. 34

34 Franz Grad v Finanzamt Traunstein (Case 9-70) [1970] ECR 825.

30