“Was the Services Directive a flop ? And how to fix it!”

Department : Law & Tax

Speaker : By Professor Vassilis HATZOPOULOS from Panteion University

Room : S 122

Abstract :

Twenty years after its adoption, Directive 2006/123/EC on services in the internal market (the ‘Services Directive’, or SD) is widely regarded as an unfinished, even disappointing, exercise in market integration. Disappointment, however,  is not evenly spread across the SD’s architecture. While Chapter III of the Directive, governing the freedom of establishment, has generated a substantial and increasingly coherent body of case law, Chapter IV – and in particular Article 16, the provision that was meant to be the operational core of the free cross-border provision of services – has remained almost a dead letter. Drawing on the Court of Justice’s docket, on the 2026 special report of the European Court of Auditors, and on the Draghi, Letta and IMF assessments of the single market for services, this presentation substantiates the claim that the liberalising effect of Chapter IV has been close to null, and proposes a reconstruction of Article 16 around a targeted, ‘half-baked’ country of origin principle, built from the proportionality and justification framework that the Court has, in the meantime, developed under the Establishment Chapter.