Talk:Water supply and sanitation in the European Union

Dispute concerning Spanish transposition of the EU directive

I have removed the following from the article because it violates policy:

However, in the Spanish transposition (Real Decreto-Ley 11/1995) the definition of a collecting system was changed, adding an addition twelve words. As a consequence, the municipal sewer and drainage networks are excluded from the Spanish transposition and there is only a need to provide a collecting system going from the municipal network to the treatment plant. If there is no municipal network there is no need to provide any collecting system at all. In addition, Spain did not bring into force the regulations and administrative provisions required by Article 19 of the Directive which were necessary to define responsibilities, procedures and the method of finance. Hundreds of thousands of EU citizens, mainly residents of urbanizations (housing estates) developed in the 1960s and 1970s, have been prejudiced by this incorrect transposition and the European Commission has inexplicably refused to take legal action to force Spain to correct the definition and bring into force the regulations and administrative provisions. Consequently, there are countless urbanisations in Spain within agglomerations of over 2000 p.e. still without collecting systems.(See 1-Real Decreto-Ley 11/1995; 2-Generalitat de Catalunya Press Statement dated June 25 2008; 3- Committee on Petitions April 30 2009, Petition Nº 0274/2006)

This is clearly not compliant with WP:NPOV, and WP:COI, WP:OR and WP:SOAP probably apply. The editor Geoffkealty (talk · contribs) appears to be a party in a dispute with the Spanish authorities and/or the Commission. See http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2004_2009/documents/dv/peti20090430_infopet274-06_/peti20090430_infopet274-06_en.pdf

--Boson (talk) 21:38, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

I do in fact have an ongoing Petition in the Committee on Petitions, supported by the Committee members for the last three years. I have no dispute with the Spanish authorities, because I have never contacted the Spanish Government on the subject. My local Council correctly informed me that they have no responsibility under the Real Decreto-Ley and therefore the Directive. The Catalan Water Agency also confirmed that they are only responsible to provide a main sewer going from the municipal network to the treatment plant if and when the municipal network exists. The Commission will take enforcement action for non-compliance with the Directive as it is doing in the case of my Petition (Nº0274/2006 available on the internet), however it will not force Spain to correct the transposition at this late stage, probably because all the dates for compliance have long passed. I have therefore edited the information again, including only factual information which can be verified by comparing the Directive with the Real Decreto-Ley and also by referring to "La lei de la millora d'urbanizacions" as regards the references to urbanizations which is also to be found on the internet. As you will understand, the Catalan Law is in Catalan, therefore if you are unable to verify the references covered by it, I would have no real objection if you need to remove that part, although it is actually saying that at last Catalonia has taken action to comply, which is probably more than other Autonomous Regions have done, but I have no information on them. I believe Wikipedia should have the true facts and therefore I hope you are able to include it all. Finally, I am a former British Environmental Health Officer and have some knowledge on the subject which perhaps is why I discovered what nobody else seems to have discovered in many years.--79.150.92.33 (talk) 00:27, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Although I appreciate the desire to publish the truth, I don't think this passage belongs in this article, and only belongs in Wikipedia if reliable secondary sources can be provided for this intrepretation of the legal situation, particularly since the European Commission apparently inteprets the legal situation differently. There are a number of issues:

• As you write, you have "discovered what nobody else seems to have discovered in many years"; this itself implies original research, which is not permitted on Wikipedia.
• There is a possible conflict of interest, and the point of view presented does not appear to be neutral (within the meaning of WP:NPOV).
• In an article covering the EU as a whole, this page would appear to give undue weight to a particular interpretation of a particular situation in a particular country. Some of this might be permissible if a secondary source, such as a book on EU law, were provided to indicate that this "case" represents a recognized precedent.

--Boson (talk) 08:42, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

I don't think I can fulfil any of your requirements, as to my knowledge there is no secondary source, although the information is completely correct and true and can be verified easily on the internet. I have attached below a reply to Blue Haired Lawyer which I placed on the EU Directives page, which is a full explanation. As you are the experts I would like you to advise me if there is any way any part of this could be included, for example in "Implementation," (due to the lack of it). If you tell me that it is not possible I will try to find other sites on the internet, as I strongly believe that people have a right to know the truth and that this information should be in the public domain, especially for EU citizens in Spain affected by the changed definition.

Dear Blue Haired Lawyer, You may consider this to be a non-story, but I see that you are a lawyer therefore you may wish to check out the following information and reach your own conclusions, even if it is only for your own curiosity as a lawyer. In my humble opinion (as a former British Environmental Health Officer) it is not a story but all facts, the majority of which can easily be verified on the internet by referring to 1) The Directive; 2) The Real Decreto-Ley 11/1995; 3) La Lei de la millora d’urbanizacions. (The Law to improve the infrastructures in urbanizations in Catalonia) and Committee on Petitions, Petition Nº 0274/2006. The Spanish Government made at the time of transposing the Directive a very serious change to the definition of a collecting system in Article 2 of the Directive. In the Directive, a collecting system means “a system of conduits which collects and conducts urban waste water” and therefore all sewers and drains, both public and private were included. However, in the Spanish transposition (Real Decreto-Ley 11/1995 of December 28 1995), the definition of a collecting system was changed to mean “all systems of conduits which collect and conduct urban waste water, from the municipal sewer and drainage networks and go to the treatment plants.” The added words mean that when the Spanish definition is applied to Article 3 of the Directive the municipal sewer and drainage networks are excluded and therefore did not need to comply with the Directive. In other words most of the public sewers were excluded and all of the private drains and sewers. If the municipal network did not exist, as in the case of many urbanizations (housing estates) developed in the 1960s and 1970s within agglomerations of over 2000 p.e. no collecting system needed to be provided at all, which would also apply to any small towns or villages covered by the Directive, which still do not have a collecting system. Obviously, if waste water is not collected it cannot be treated, therefore the changed definition also affected Article 4 of the Directive. On top of all that the regulations and administrative provisions required by Article 19 were never brought into force and do not exist. In addition, no already existing legislation complied with the requirements of the Directive and none was amended to do so. My local Council (with over 30 urbanizations, 20 kilometres from Barcelona and in an agglomeration of over 15000 p.e. in a declared sensitive area) considers correctly that it has no responsibilities under the Real Decreto-Ley and the Catalan Water Agency, correctly, only accepts responsibility for the main sewers going from the municipal network to the treatment plant if and when the municipal network exists. The Spanish Government did not delegate responsibility for complying with the Directive within the municipal areas to anybody. On March 5 2009, the Catalan Autonomous Government finally approved a law (La Llei de la millora d’urbanizacions) to deal with deficits of infrastructures, such as sewers in urbanizations in Catalonia, 18 years after the Directive was approved by the European Parliament, but with no time limits. I have an ongoing Petition in the Committee on Petitions, since early 2006, for non-compliance in Corbera de Llobregat where I live, which has been included in a Reasoned Opinion (a final warning) issued last November by the Commission to the Spanish Government. I didn’t discover the changed definition until September 2007 and since then I have been trying to get the Commission to take action to correct the transposition, with the full support of the Committee on Petitions. The Commission has always insisted that the transposition is correct, but when pressured by Committee members on April 30th 2009, the Commission representative stated that, “the Commission considers that the formal transposition is correct,” which as you will appreciate is now only an opinion and no longer a fact and it has not justified that opinion with anything and has already conceded in writing in May of 2008 that the Real Decreto-Ley does only cover collecting systems going from the municipal network to the treatment plant. Members of the Committee urged them to consider in more detail this question and decided that the examination of my Petition would resume as soon as new information was received. Nevertheless, I do not expect the Commission will ever admit the truth as it would mean confirming that they were fooled by the Spanish Government in 1995, unless they allowed it, but why would they have done that? No doubt they also think that nothing would be gained by admitting the truth as in reality the compliance dates passed long ago and they would only be confirming that they failed as Guardians of the Treaty. You may not think this information should be in Wikipedia, but in my opinion it should be in the public domain and perhaps the verifiable facts could be included under the heading “Implementation” of the Directive (for the lack of it). The new Catalan Law is very controversial due to the high costs which will be involved, which in many cases will exceed 40,000 euros per householder as renewal of other infrastructures will also be required, before the urbanizations are adopted by the Councils. Spain has received almost 200 billion euros from the EU in Cohesion Funds and Regional Development Funds etc. up to now and had local authorities been given responsibility to comply with the Directive I am sure that they would have asked for a share of the cake. That may well be why the Spanish Government changed the definition and gave nobody the responsibility to comply in the municipal areas themselves. I have no knowledge or information on the levels of non-compliance in the other Autonomous Regions of Spain, but in Catalonia, according to official information of the Generalitat, there are over 1,300 urbanizations with deficient sewer systems or no sewers (mostly no sewers) many of which are in agglomerations of over 2000 p.e. Finally, do not believe everything the Commission says, as I can assure you that the Commission has no scruples about not telling the truth when it suits their needs.--Geoffkealty (talk) 11:36, 12 July 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Geoffkealty (talk • contribs)

I found this very interesting, and I have compared the Directive and the Real Decreto and they are different. Although the transposition is not the same as the Directive, the Spanish authorities had and still have the obligation to comply fully with the Directive, so I have made a small change to clarify this.--Ricardo Lawyer (talk) 12:53, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

This is very interesting, but it does not belong in an encyclopaedia. It is not up to Wikipedia editors to assess the legal position of the Spanish authorities. This whole paragraph is unsourced original research and should be removed.--Boson (talk) 17:20, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Geoffkealty mentions that he "will try to find other sites on the internet" about this issue. If these sources are reliable (e.g. blogs obviously don't qualify, but an article from El Pais would do) and if they bring out both sides of the story, I think it should be possible to cover this issue in the article, either fully or partly. One possible source could be the detailed reports published by the EU commission every five years about the implementation of any EU directive, which it did for the last time in 2004 (the report is quoted in the article). I would expect the issue to be included in the progress report that, I would expect, the Commission will publish this year. That would definitely be a solid source for the article.

Many EU countries apparently realized after the fact that building sewer networks in small towns, some of which have a dispersed settlement pattern, is very costly and, as some argue, provides very limited benefits compared to on-site sanitation systems. The issue has come up in Eastern Germany where sewer tariffs went through the roof as a result of the implementation of the directive. It has also been an issue in France which did quite some acrobatics similar to those in Spain to avoid the implementation of the directive, and has been sued by the European Court of Justice for that (see http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/08/150&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en). There seems to be some regret that when the original directive was established, people were not fully aware of its implications in terms of costs concerning sewerage networks in small towns with dispersed settlement patterns. I do not have sources ready to corroborate this, but since this is the talk page of the article, I wanted to share it to make those who may not be familiar with the topic aware of this side of the story as well.

In any case, as Boson writes, sources are required and any part that remains unsourced or constitutes original research needs to be removed.

Concerning the conflict of interest issue, it is very hard for anyone knowledgeable on a subject not to have opinions or not to have been engaged in a debate on one side or the other. The litmus test for me on Wikipedia is that, when a person writes on Wikipedia, he or she has to leave his/her opinion at the door and abide by the NPOV rule. They should definitely not be prevented from writing on Wikipedia, and I believe no one intended to imply that.

Finally, I suggest that the article or parts of it, if they can be sourced and written in such a way that they abide by NPOV, could be moved to Water supply and sanitation in Spain instead of this page, or perhaps leaving just a brief summary on this page.--Mschiffler (talk) 07:19, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

I have created an article on the Urban Waste Water Directive, including a number of references that might be useful (based on the suggestion above). It could probably do with some TLC, but I thought it would be a good idea to make a start. Personally, I would tend to put the more detailed discussion of implementation by member states, including Spain, there. There are probably a few countries (e.g. Spain. Italy, UK) that deserve a section of their own. I was hoping to find something about the potential direct effect of this directive if not correctly transposed, but I haven't found anything as yet.--Boson (talk) 17:32, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

First of all I am pleased that this has created some discussion, however I would like to make it very clear that the present content of the entry regarding Spain is all fact and not an opinion. Every line can be verified on the internet by checking it against the directive and the Spanish law and even the European Commission could not dispute the present entry. If there is a wikipedia email address, I can send you an email from the Commission which confirms what I have said about the Real Decreto-Ley. The Commission claims incorrectly that already existing legislation made the transposition correct, which in reality is absurd so I am still fighting that with the full support of the Committee on Petitions. Therefore as long as it does not say the transposition is incorrect, it is all fact.--Geoffkealty (talk) 19:20, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

The present content (under the heading Content) is as follows:

However, in the case of Spain changes were made at the time of transposing the Directive. In Article 2 of the Directive, a collecting system means “a system of conduits which collects and conducts urban waste water” and therefore all sewers and drains, both public and private were included. However, in the Spanish transposition (Real Decreto-Ley 11/1995 of December 28 1995), the definition of a collecting system was changed to mean “all systems of conduits which collect and conduct urban waste water, from the municipal sewer and drainage networks and go to the treatment plants.” The added words mean that when the Spanish definition is applied to Article 3 of the Directive the municipal sewer and drainage networks are excluded. If the municipal network did not exist, as in the case of many urbanizations (housing estates) developed in the 1960s and 1970s and within agglomerations of over 2000 p.e. no collecting system needed to be provided at all, under the Real Decreto-Ley 11/1995. Obviously if waste water is not collected it cannot be treated, therefore the changed definition also affected Article 4 of the Directive. Even so, Spain had to and still has to comply fully with the Directive. On March 5 2009, the Catalan Autonomous Government finally approved a law (La Llei de la millora d’urbanizacions) to deal with deficits of infrastructures, such as sewers in urbanizations in Catalonia, 18 years after the Directive was approved by the European Parliament.

I still have a number of issues with this:

• It seems to give undue weight to a particular assessment of the situation in Spain.
• It is under the heading Content, whereas it seems to be essentially about implementation or transposition in Spain, not about the content of the directive itself. The general issue appears to be discussed under Implementation challenges.
• It appears to me to be arguing a case, which is not the purpose of Wikipedia. This is reinforced by words like "however",.
• It appears to present only one side of the argument.
• The argument appears to be that the wording of the directive was "changed" in the Spanish transposition. Transposition is supposed to achieve the effect specified by the directive, without any requirement to use the exact wording. The argument is tantamount to claiming that the national legislation did not correctly transpose the directive, which is a legal assessment. That would require a source for the assessment (not just a source verifying the facts on which the editor's assessment is based). If the Commission has published an assessment that transposition was correct and the Committee on Petitions has published an assessment that transposition was incorrect, then both of these assessments could be described (though I'm not sure this is the right section of the right article for that).

--Boson (talk) 22:19, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

You are the experts on Wikipedia and therefore what should be included and what shouldn't, I will leave up to you. Nevertheless, you say transposition is supposed to achieve the effect specified by the directive, without any requirement to use the exact wording. It is also recognised and emphasised by the Commission that citizens should enforce EU legislation, including directives, through their national courts. Due to the changed definition, probably the most important definition in the directive that cannot be done in Spain, as there is no Spanish legislation complying with the directive, covering the municipal networks. In addition, the "effect" if that means compliance has not been achieved in Spain on a very large scale, because Spain never intended to comply, hence the changed definition.--Geoffkealty (talk) 16:43, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

Dear Boston, In your comment of july 19 you said you hadn't been able to find anything about the direct effect. I have the following information from the Commission: Upto now there have been 18 judgements in the European Court of Justice and further cases are currently being considered by the court. In addition on November 27 2008 the Commission gave Spain a final warning (a reasoned opinion) on two parallel cases, the first relating to 343 Spanish towns and cities in sensitive or potentially sensitive areas and the second relating to 59 towns and cities over 15000 inhabitants. The town where I live is included. The Committee on Petitions has informed me that the next step will be a legal case. So far the Commission has taken no action in agglomerations between 2000 and 15000 unless they are in sensitive areas. Most of the urbanizations without collecting systems in Catalonia are in those agglomerations. Finally, the Member States may not have to use the exact wording when transposing, but they are required to transpose a directive in its entirety and due to the changed definition Spain did not do so. You now have all the information I can give you, so I will leave it upto you and hopefully you will find somewhere where at least a part of it could be included.--Geoffkealty (talk) 19:20, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Well, I am just expressing my interpretation of policy. I have put what I thought was appropriate (i.e. what is backed up by published material) in the article Urban Waste Water Directive. I'd like to wait and see what others think, but I still have a problem with what I regard as assessments, without a published opinion by a reliable source or something like a court judgment.

Just to clarify what I meant by "direct effect":

As I understand it, there are two ways of enforcement: the first is for the Commission to take the country to court;

the second is also based on the allegation that the member state has not properly transposed the directive into national law; if this is true, under certain circumstances, the directive may have "direct effect", i.e it effectively supersedes national law and must be enforced by the national courts (after referral to the ECJ for a ruling); this could include state liability for breach of EU law. That is why I had hoped to find something about the possible direct effect of this directive. There is also the issue of indirect effect. --Boson (talk) 20:44, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

The "direct effect" is very interesting and I will investigate if it could be used in my case. Thanks very much, the Commission has never told me that. Just for curiosity what is indirect effect?--Geoffkealty (talk) 18:25, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

I don't want to get into discussing the subject, as opposed to the content of the page, but you can click on these two links: indirect effect and direct effect (bearing in mind that the articles are not well referenced). Indirect effect, as I understand it, imposes on the national courts a duty to attempt to interpret national law in conformity with EU law (possibly to the extent of "bending" the normal interpretation of national law). I don't know if it is of any practical use here; I can imagine it is a very lengthy and costly prosess, involving a lengthy appeal process. --Boson (talk) 18:52, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, in the case of Spain definitely a question of many years.--Geoffkealty (talk) 11:29, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Sometime you just cant put your finger on it

I think this topic (by-and-large) belongs in an encyclopedia. I think its presence here has value. But, there is just something about this article that smacks of lopsided POV. It just has a spirit of non-NPOV to it........I can't put my finger on what/where, but its there. Someone here has been/is grinding an axe. --Bddmagic (talk) 22:05, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

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Adding information about wastweater reuse

I am planning to move information about wastewater reuse in Europe from the article on reclaimed water to here (see this piece). Would that be OK by you and if yes, where exactly should it go? EMsmile (talk) 13:30, 21 March 2017 (UTC)