Less than a year into its European Union membership, Bulgaria opened its legal action record against the European Commission (EC). In its first ever challenge against the EU’s executive arm, Bulgaria is contesting the calculation of the greenhouse gas quotas for the 2008-2012 period.
Representatives from the governmental department Procedural Representation of the Republic of Bulgaria before the European Court of Human Rights will be making the case with the Court of First Instance.
The EC decided on December 26 last year to cut the country’s CO2 allowances by 37 per cent to an annual 42.3 million tons. Bulgaria had requested 67.6 million tons a year.
The bill of indictment was filed on December 28 with the Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice, Bulgaria’s governmental press office reported that day. The bill, given a governmental nod eight days before, was authored by the Ministry of Environment and Water Affairs.
It refers to procedural violations, transgression of the material law and basic principles of the European legislation.
The Government took a go-ahead decision after the EC refused on December 20 2007 to review the country’s emissions quotas despite Bulgaria’s reasoned request to do so.
As earlier reported, in November a team of Bulgarian ministry officials, experts and business persons showcased a number of arguments, which allegedly found the EC as having used wrong input data while calculating Bulgaria’s greenhouse quotas.
The December 28 bill, filed with the Luxembourg court, saw the EC in failure to comply with a major criterion of Directive 2003/87/EC. The paper establishes a scheme for greenhouse gas trading and ensures compliance with the Kyoto Protocol greenhouse gas reduction goals.
“Bulgaria does not only comply with its Kyoto Protocol commitments to cut its emissions by eight per cent against the benchmark year 1998 but is also 48 per cent below its 1998 emissions,” the statement of the governmental press office read.
Another argument in Bulgaria’s legal challenge said that while the EC has calculated the quotas under the PRIMES model, it failed to analyse the national allowances in view of the country-specific economic development.
In November last year, the Bulgarian negotiating team explained to officials in Brussels that the quotas, as calculated by the European Commission, allegedly contained technical errors and have disregarded changes of major impact on emissions’ volume in Bulgaria. For example, the closure of Units 3 and 4 of Kozloduy nuclear power plant had effected a material change to the country’s electricity generation sector.
The EC’s rejection of Bulgaria’s national plans and cut in allowances puts Bulgarian business in an inequitable position compared to other operators within the greenhouse gas trading scheme.
“In this way, the EC violated the proportionality and equitable treatment principle,” the governmental statement reads.
All the more, the Government argued, the commission does not entertain the right to assign quotas without heeding to the plans developed by the EU member states. “In this way, the EC over-stretched its supervisory authority by replacing the methodology used by the Bulgarian side with one impertinent for the Bulgarian economy and which was in violation of part of the EC criteria,” the statement read.
Bulgaria’s decision to bring the EC to court comes at a time when Slovakia received an increase to its annual quotas. Slovakia is among the states to be in court proceedings with the European Commission on that matter.
Meanwhile, it emerged that Japan had been among the countries to court East European states with offers to buy greenhouse gas quotas. The first country to have agreed to sell was Hungary, a news report of Bulgarian news agency BTA reads.
The two countries signed a memorandum on December 18 that defined the general provisions for a general agreement to be signed at a later date. The volume of emissions to be purchased, as well as the price, will be set later.
Among other countries in talks with Japan are Poland and the Czech Republic.
