In addition to the primacy of EU law (also known as primacy), direct effect is a fundamental principle of EU law. Contracts and regulations are directly effective vertically and horizontally. A contract or settlement may be used as a legal act before a court of a Member State against the State or another person. Direct effect and secondary legislation: the principle of direct effect also applies to acts of secondary law, i.e. acts adopted by the institutions on the basis of the founding Treaties. However, the application of direct effect depends on the nature of the act: (i) the Regulation: regulations always have direct effect. Indeed, Article 288 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU states that the rules are directly applicable in EU countries. In the Politi judgment of 14 October, the Court of Justice ruled that the Court of Justice had issued a decision on environmental protection. In December 1971, it was clear that this was a complete direct effect; (ii) the Directive: the Directive is a legal act addressed to EU countries and must be transposed into national law by them.
In some cases, however, the Court recognises the direct effect of directives protecting the rights of individuals. Accordingly, the Court has held in its case-law that a directive has direct effect if its provisions are unconditional, sufficiently clear and precise and if the country of the Union has not transposed the directive within the prescribed period (judgment of 4 December 1974, Van Duyn). However, it can only have a direct vertical effect; EU countries are required to transpose directives, but directives cannot be invoked by an EU country against an individual (judgment of 5. April 1979, Ratti); (iii) the decision: decisions may have direct effect if they designate an EU country as the addressee. The Court therefore recognises only direct vertical effect (judgment of 10 November 1992, Hansa Fleisch); (iv) international agreements: in the Demirel judgment of 30 September 1987, the Court recognised the direct effect of certain agreements on the basis of the same criteria as those laid down in the Van Gend en Loos judgment; (v) Opinions and recommendations: Opinions and recommendations are not legally binding. Therefore, they are not provided with direct effect. © The words “in the form prescribed by the Treaty” and “as provided for in the provisions of the Treaty” are intended to emphasise that legal instruments which retain direct applicability are only those acts expressly listed in the Treaty [4]. Indeed, I find neither in the TEU nor in the TFEU an explicit definition of direct applicability: we implicitly deduce it from Article 288(2) TFEU: `A regulation is of general application. It is binding in its entirety and directly applicable in all Member States. » Judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union, Van Gend en Loos v Dutch tax authorities — the fundamental principle of direct effect So what happens if the State does not transpose a directive? [3] The Court of Justice adopted this concept in Case 39/72, Commission v Italy, p. 3. 17, stated: `Consequently, all methods of implementation infringe the Treaty, with the effect of hindering the direct effect of UNION regulations and jeopardising their simultaneous and uniform application throughout the Union`.
Finally, if, on the one hand, the regulations are directly applicable in their entirety because, it should be repeated, the Treaty so provides and, on the other hand, when it comes to direct effect, it is appropriate and correct to refer only to the provisions contained in an official act (whether a regulation or a directive) and not to the act as a whole: Not all provisions contain the same substantive content and not all have clear, precise and unconditional wording. Confusingly, directives are not directly effective because they cannot be used in court until they have been adopted by national law. Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited. The reference could be made by quoting Antonio Racano, Direct Applicability vs. Direct Effect: Guidelines for Students, Madama Louise, 2017.