Corrigenda in the Official Journal of the European Union: Community Law as Quicksand

Abstract

This article enters a grey area of EC institutional practice: the continuous and ever-growing practice of corrigenda of legislative texts being published in the Official Journal of the European Union. It addresses this issue from the point of view of national judges or administrators, who become increasingly puzzled by Community legislative measures being constantly rewritten and wonder what this means for their already adopted judgments and decisions. The argument put forward is that the practice of corrigenda in Community law has reached such a level that one cannot any longer consider meaning-changing corrigenda as mere rectifications which can be applied retrospectively. In instances such as those discussed in this article, meaning-changing corrigenda amount to amendments in a material sense. Community law should recognise them as such, especially as far as their temporal application is concerned.