(fra kommisjonsforslaget)

EXPLANATORY MEMORANDUM

1.In the context of a people’s Europe, the Commission attaches great importance to simplifying and clarifying the law of the Union so as to make it clearer and more accessible to citizens, thus giving them new opportunities and the chance to make use of the specific rights it gives them.

This aim cannot be achieved so long as numerous provisions that have been amended several times, often quite substantially, remain scattered, so that they must be sought partly in the original instrument and partly in later amending ones. Considerable research work, comparing many different instruments, is thus needed to identify the current rules.

For this reason, a codification of rules that have frequently been amended is also essential if the law is to be clear and transparent.

2.On 1 April 1987 the Commission decided 1 to instruct its staff that all acts should be codified after no more than ten amendments, stressing that this is a minimum requirement and that departments should endeavour to codify at even shorter intervals the texts for which they are responsible, to ensure that their provisions are clear and readily understandable.

3.The Conclusions of the Presidency of the Edinburgh European Council (December 1992) confirmed this 2 , stressing the importance of codification as it offers certainty as to the law applicable to a given matter at a given time.

Codification must be undertaken in full compliance with the normal procedure for the adoption of acts of the Union.

Given that no changes of substance may be made to the instruments affected by codification, the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission agreed, by an interinstitutional agreement dated 20 December 1994, that an accelerated procedure may be used for the fast-track adoption of codification instruments.

4.The purpose of this proposal is to undertake a codification of Directive 2003/25/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 April 2003 on specific stability requirements for ro-ro passenger ships 3 . The new Directive will supersede the various acts incorporated in it 4 ; this proposal fully preserves the content of the acts being codified and hence does no more than bring them together with only such formal adaptations as are required by the codification exercise itself.

5.The codification proposal was drawn up on the basis of a preliminary consolidation, in all official languages, of Directive 2003/25/EC and the instruments amending it, carried out by the Publications Office of the European Union, by means of a data-processing system. Where the Articles have been given new numbers, the correlation between the old and the new numbers is shown in a table set out in Annex V to the codified Directive.