Open Access

It has long been a commonplace that the European Union forms a community of law and that the principle of “integration through law” is one of its central characteristics. In view of the growing scope and complexity of Union law, which requires ever new adaptations from the Member States, research on the implementation of Union law, which also works empiri-cally, is gaining considerable importance. An international research project conducted at the German Research Institute for Public Administration was dedicated to the implementation and adaptation strategies of selected EU Member States. It investigated the transposition of organisational and procedural requirements for national administrations as laid down in EU directives related to environmental and energy policy. The investigation focused on various modalities of transposition: minimum transposition (“copy out”), the enactment of provisions that create obligations going beyond the requirements of the Directive (“gold-plating”) and the extension of the rules or principles of the Directive to other fields of law (“spill-over”), either by including a subject area not provided for in the Directive in the scope of application of the transposition provisions (spill-over in the narrow sense) or by fundamentally reforming a legal area on the occasion of the Directive (spill-over in the broad sense). The comparative analysis revealed a low degree of strategic use of transposition modalities. However, there is a growing awareness among Member States that they belong not only to a law community, but also to an implementation community. This is not least due to the mechanisms and procedures of intertwining Union and national action.

The history of German public procurement law is a history of attempts by the German legislator to implement the EU public procurement directives on judicial protection, namely Directive 89/665/EEC of 21 December 1989, as minimally as possible. Paradoxically, the history of German procurement law is also the history of an increased spreading of the model of judicial review in ‘competitive award procedures’ underlying Directive 89/665/EEC to other administrative procedures. Here, one can discern mutual fertilization of the discussions on the minimal standards for judicial protection foreseen in Directive 89/665/EEC, as well as a parallel discussion on mini-mal standards (directly derived from the German constitution) for judicial review in competi-tive award procedures concerning the recruitment of public officials. On this basis, one may discern trends in German case law, administrative practice, and scho-larship towards developing judicial review systems in competitive award procedures for pub-lic procurement beyond the thresholds set by the EU directives. This is relevant for privati-zations, gambling licences, and procedures to grant the right to use public spaces, to name only a few. However, these trends encounter difficulties because the German General Administrative Court Procedure Act and other relevant legislation are not tailored to com-petitive award procedures. This article will analyse these different trends and suggest explanations for them.

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