EU BYTES PHOTO: David Hughes/Adobe Stock
Will the CJEU no longer have a role to play in complaints? No. The CJEU is very much still in the game. Do you remember preliminary rulings? A Member State court can ask for an opinion from the CJEU for the purpose of interpretation of EU law. These rulings/ opinions can still have an impact on national court cases as the preliminary rulings have to be taken into account by the national court.
Does that give Member States carte blanche to do what they want? Not really, because taking into account the question above, there are still channels for EU law to have an impact on Member State regulation. It is just the ”Commission considers that complaints in the gambling sector can be handled more efficiently by national courts also in the light of the numerous judgements of the Court of Justice of the EU on national gambling legislation.”
Will this decision provide more certainty in Member State regulation? That really depends on the Member State. From my experience, Member States are sometimes pretty good at making a mess of it themselves. See the
two-strand gambling regulation approach in Germany – i.e. Schleswig-Holstein’s more open market version to that of the Interstate Treaty. In any case, just because the European Commission is no longer exerting political pressure with infringement cases, it does not mean that the CJEU cannot shatter Member State dreams of their vision of perfect gambling regulation thus creating a grey zone where the wild west of gambling offers roams due to the lack of legally justifiable enforcement. I was not only pointing fingers at the German market in this case.
Does the Commission no longer have any interest in the modernisation of gambling markets to adapt to new technologies?
No, the Commission is indeed still interested. They openly state in the Press Release that they look to support “efforts to modernise their national online gambling legal frameworks and to facilitate cooperation between national gambling regulators.” The Commission is very much still in the gambling game. But, it has given itself a friendlier Leitmotif.
Greetings from Brussels. JANUARY 2018 31
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