Belgium achieves its best result in ten years as to the transposition of European directives into Belgian legislation

With 0.7%, Belgium achieved its best result for the transposition deficit in the past ten years in June 2024. This puts it below the EU maximum standard of 1%. In the context of the Belgian Presidency of the Council of the EU, considerable efforts have been made to transpose European directives into Belgian law correctly, timely and completely. This catch up has clearly paid off.

The transposition of European directives into Belgian law is crucial to guarantee the rule of law for citizens and businesses. One of the initiatives of the European Commission as supervisor of the implementation process is the conclusion of the Single Market Scoreboard. There is an unofficial one in June and an official one in December that is published with a press release.

The scoreboard measures the performance of the internal market on the basis of a number of indicators. One of these is the transposition deficit: the percentage of internal market directives that a Member State has not transposed on time. In recent years, Belgium had built up a considerable deficit. For example, in 2021 it rose to 2.8%, while the Commission applies an EU maximum standard of 1%.

In view of the Belgian Presidency, our Federal Public Service (FPS), as the coordinating administration of the transposition process, started to catch up. This entailed a strong cooperation with the other federal and federated entities, as each authority was responsible for the transposition within its own area of competence. Gradually, we managed to reduce the deficit to 2.3% in December 2022 and to 1.6% in December 2023. However, our country still lagged behind within the group of EU member States.

On the June 2024 scoreboard, Belgium achieves 0.7%; the best result of the past ten years. With this, our country finally dips below the EU standard again and we place ourselves eighth in the ranking. The European average is 0.9%. This progress is the result of the intensification of the follow-up of the transposition process by our FPS at all levels.

In addition to maintaining these good transposition figures in December 2024, the high number of infringement proceedings constitutes a major challenge. The June 2024 scoreboard counts 30 infringements against Belgium (excluding non-com) compared to an EU average of 23. The FPS Foreign Affairs is making efforts with all actors involved to identify bottlenecks and to maintain contact with the Commission in order to reduce this number as well.

For more information about transposition and a monthly overview, please click here.