The doctrine of “direct effect” of Community law is applicable in principle at least to all binding Community law, including the EC Treaties, secondary law and international agreements. This means that clear, precise and unconditional provisions of Community law can be invoked by individuals before national courts or, more subjectively, that a provision can confer individual rights. However, there are difficulties with the concept of direct effect and limitations on where and when it will apply; the most problematic are the directives. Although there have been extensions of this idea, both with horizontal and indirect effects, the principle is still not free from restrictions. In Cappelletti's words “if a court is forced to condone the total violation of a rule, that rule can no longer be defined as law,” which is perhaps part of the reason for the limits of direct effect. In this essay I would like to discuss what the limits are and whether they should still be maintained or not. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Some, like Sacha Prechal, believe that EU law should simply become applicable in all contexts and be treated in the same way as national law, as the “law of the land”. However, different types of Community law have different types of legal effects. It seems strange in the first place that this happens because of the principle of supremacy. This principle is that Community law will prevail over national courts and Member States will therefore set aside conflicting provisions of national law, following a monist approach. Why then is the direct effect necessary? As Prechal said, “Community law is integrated into the legal systems of the Member States”, so aren't they already effective in national law without having to be directly effective? In reality, this is not the case: the direct effect is necessary because there is no contractual obligation to strive for supremacy, and therefore this “ideal” of supremacy is actually supported through the idea of ​​direct effect. Furthermore, many Member States, such as the UK, have a much more dualist attitude towards EU law: there is national law and EU law and they are not the same thing. The direct effect must be there because politically if EU law were only national law this would mean a renunciation of sovereignty, which most countries cannot and are not willing to do. In the case of Van Gend en Loos, they imported a quantity of a chemical substance from Germany to the Netherlands, on which, contrary to Article 12, a presumably higher tax has been levied since the entry into force of the EEC Treaty. The question was whether, on the basis of this article, national citizens can claim any individual rights. In the ruling, the European Court of Justice put forward several arguments in favor of direct effect, stating that the objective of the EEC Treaty was to establish a common market. This implies more than one agreement and therefore creates mutual obligations. The preamble of this Treaty refers not only to governments but to people, which is then confirmed by the creation of institutions with sovereign rights that influence member states and citizens. It imposes limitations on people but also gives them rights, and it is therefore advantageous that these Treaty provisions and other areas of Community law have direct effect as it promotes the objectives of the Treaty, while at the same time directly conferring individual rights. In other words, this concept was meant to createa democratic ideal. However, despite this ideal, limitations on direct effect by the European Court of Justice have been established, making it more difficult to invoke action by an individual. One problem is that, to be directly effective, a provision must be “self-executing”. . “It should be clear, negative, unconditional, without reservations on the part of the Member State and not dependent on any national constraints. implementing measure” However, since the Van Gend en Loos ruling, this measure has been expanded in some respects considering the parties precise and “unconditional” provisions of the Treaty's broader provisions and allowing them to be used directly by a national court. This can be seen in the Costa v ENEL case, where the Court ruled that, although Article 31(1) of the EC Treaty imposed a positive obligation on Member States to adapt state monopolies of a commercial nature, it also contained “a absolute right, prohibition, obligation to refrain from doing something" 4. The latter could have direct effect as it was unconditional. In this case, if the European Court of Justice imposed these strict limitations on where a provision could be directly effective, and then expanded them to accommodate more forms of EU law, why bother having these strict guidelines? It seems that in this case any provision of the Treaty can be considered to have a clear unconditional part and can therefore become directly effective. Furthermore, in the Commission v Italy case, where the Commission established by regulation a system of premiums for the slaughter of cows and the withdrawal of dairy products from the market, the regulations have direct effect and it criticized any Member State which attempted to change a regulation. There are therefore some areas of Community law which appear to have few or no limitations regarding their direct applicability. However, in the case of directives, this particular broadening of judgment does not work. The strict guidelines go against the direct effectiveness of the directives as they actually require implementation by member states. Pursuant to Article 249, the directive "is binding, as to the result to be achieved, for each Member State to which it is addressed, without prejudice to the competence of the national authorities as to the form and means". But doesn't this prove that all directives are binding and therefore have no direct effect, which means nothing? It can be said that the directives constitute an equally important part of the objectives of the Treaty and that their correct implementation is an integral part of community policy. The European Court of Justice wanted to give directives some effect even when they had not been properly implemented, because they were equally important. Their argument, as set out in Van Duyn v Home Office, was that, as the directives are binding, no possibility of invoking them before a national court cannot be ruled out. In this case a Dutch national had come to the UK to work for the Church of Scientology but was not allowed to enter because Scientology was considered socially harmful. It has been argued that each provision needs to be examined in context to see whether it is clear enough to be imposed on a national court. This was not the final word on the directives: there were limits imposed on this idea, as some felt that the European Court of Justice had gone too far in the face of the obvious limitations on the direct effect of the directives. However, it was still felt that there should be a way to enforce the directives where a Member State had not implemented them correctly,the idea of ​​“estoppel”, explored in the case of the Public Prosecutor against Tullio Ratti. The attitude of the Court of Justice was that individuals should not bear the brunt of a Member State's failure to implement a directive, and this shows the reasoning behind the idea of ​​direct effect of directives. Article 249 does not give direct effect to directives, only to regulations, but when a Member State has not implemented them correctly, there could be a similar effect to regulations. However, with each expansion of the Directive Principle there was an additional check on its progress, which came in the form of Marshall. In this case, Marshall was dismissed after 14 years of work by the Health Authority, on the basis that she was over the retirement age for women, but national legislation did not require her to do so. He argued that his dismissal breached the Equal Treatment Directive and the Court of Justice was asked whether individuals could rely on the directive. The distinction between regulations and directives has been continuously underlined and the provision of Article 249 according to which in the above case they have no direct effect, so the Court has established that directives cannot have direct effect against individuals, but only against the State. The main reason given by the Court of Justice for not granting horizontal direct effect to directives was largely based on Article 249, according to which the binding power of a directive exists only in relation to the State to which it is addressed. Despite this, the European Court of Justice The European Court of Justice developed the idea of ​​the vertical effect of directives, and this was also established in the Marshall judgment. The justification for allowing this type of direct effect is to prevent the State from taking advantage of its failure to comply with EU law, returning to the idea of ​​estoppel in the case of Pubblico Consiglio v Tullio Ratti. Another, more questionable, justification is that directives are unable to impose obligations on individuals since the binding character of a directive only exists for each Member State to which it is addressed, thus prohibiting horizontal direct effect. It can be argued that this formalist mode of interpretation does not “fit comfortably” with the court's more focused approach in other areas. In light of all these facts, it appears that the European Court of Justice is determined, despite the limitations it can impose through case law, to have some direct effect on directives. If this were the case, and if all directives were binding under Article 249, such limitations would seem rather senseless. Indirect effect was another different way to enforce the direct effect of directives. This requires that national law is interpreted in light of the directives, a “harmonious interpretation”. In this way the directives would still have some effect even if they were not properly implemented. This was clearly observed in the Von Colson case, where the applicants wanted a specific remedy relating to appointment to the post in their sex discrimination complaint, and even though the Equal Treatment Directive was not specific enough to grant it, the court decided what the objectives of the directives could be. This was a key case to reinforce the effect of unimplemented or incorrectly implemented directives as the European Court of Justice wanted national courts to integrate their own legislation with that of the directive. Although there were, as usual, limitations, this can be seen as a way of integrating the directives (even if only to a small extent) into the.