The proposed patient mobility directive; something left to desire?

In a recent TILEC discussion paper, TILEC member Wolf Sauter (NZA, TILEC) discusses the European Commission's proposal for a Directive on the application of patients' rights in cross-border healthcare, against the background of an overview of the preceding patient mobility case law of the European Court of Justice. The author finds that the proposal is not a full codification of the case law as it leaves out certain guarantees developed by the Court. The Court had accepted public interest justifications for prior authorisation requirements with respect to hospital treatment, and focused on developing substantive and procedural guarantees of patients' rights. In its proposal, the Commission takes a different approach, by both requiring Member States to actually demonstrate the need for a prior authorisation regime, and at the same time showing that in most cases this is unlikely to be warranted. Because the case law-based criteria for "undue delay" would no longer be used to determine when authorisations must be granted, there will be no clear EU standard to apply if any authorisation requirements survive. New in the proposal are the patients' rights to accountability and transparency, which apply to all patients in each Member State. This represents a first step from negative integration (liberalisation) to positive integration (harmonisation).

Panogiotis Delimatsis, new TILEC member

In August 2008, we welcomed Panagiotis Delimatsis, our newly appointed Assistant Professor for International Trade Law. Panagiotis holds the first position created under the new tenure-track regime of the Faculty of Law of Tilburg University. The creation of this position was made possible through the additional financing granted by the Central Board of the University for the period 2007-2011. It is the second of two TILEC-instigated appointments relating to international trade, together with that of Amrita Ray Chaudhuri at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration. Panagiotis previously held positions with the World Trade Institute, the WTO Appellate Body Secretariat, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the International Centre for Sports Studies in Neuchatel and the University of Bern. He has considerable expertise in the regulation of international trade, trade in services in particular, as well as EC law. His main research interests include regulatory diversity in services, regulatory reform and principles of good governance in the services domain, and the effects of domestic regulatory structures on factor mobility. Panagiotis is the author of "International Trade in Services and Domestic Regulations - Necessity, Transparency, and Regulatory Diversity" (International Economic Law Series, Oxford University Press, 2007).

On the way to a pan-European energy market?

Last month, the European Commission proposed a third legislative package for the energy sector. Further integration of the European energy markets is one of the main objectives. An Agency for the Cooperation of National Energy Regulators (ACER), with binding decision powers, would be created to facilitate cross-border energy flows. The second Energy Economics Policy Seminar, jointly organized by TILEC, the Dutch competition authority (NMa), the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB), and the Dutch Ministry for Economic Affairs in The Hague last month, discussed the remaining
obstacles on the way towards integration. Boaz Moselle (The Brattle Group) argued that the third liberalisation package does not go far enough, as full unbundling of the high-voltage transmission network is not imposed, and the ACER will not have sufficient powers. Mette Bjørndal (Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, Bergen) talked about the difficulties of setting up an integrated energy market when the physical aspects of the network are not fully taken into account during the market design phase. She further showed that different congestion mechanisms can create large externalities for other networks and that the incentives of the different network operators are therefore not aligned.