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The new Directive now enters the transposition phase
Following the formal adoption of Directive 2010/63/EU on 20 October 2010, all EU Member States now have two years to implement national legislation (or equivalent regulations or administrative provisions) to transpose the provisions of the directive into national law.
Given the complexity of the directive, some countries are likely to require most if not all of the two years to achieve this. Some of the new Member States have legal mechanisms and the political will to adopt new directives in a single move, simply using the EU text as the wording for their new law. Paradoxically, it is probably those older Member States who implemented the previous directive (86/609/EU) with the greatest attention to detail and then amended it over the intervening 24 years, who will have the most work to do. They will need to ensure an effective transition from one complex system to a similar, but subtly different system of regulation.
One of the driving forces behind the new directive was the variation in the way that the previous directive was implemented across the EU. With the implementation of the new directive there will be greater pressure on Member States to harmonise their resulting national legislation. However, such harmonisation will only result from initiatives by the Member States themselves as there is no pan-EU mechanism to facilitate it.