knowledge of those rights. By excluding the annex from the statute it meant that the Swedish government had consciously reduced the possibility of gaining this knowledge, since from the point of view of the Commission the directive and the annex constituted an indivisible whole. Clearly the Commission had a case. It seems absurd that EU consumers could be expected to retrieve information about their new rights not only from the statute itself, but also from Swedish legislative history. The ECJ has always paid particular attention to arguments referring to obligations on member states to ensure that any community measure conferring new rights on EU citizens must be given full effect, even though the measure concerned, as in this case, represented a minimum harmonisation directive.The Court had furthermore ruled in a previous case that “implementation through legislative history” could not be considered a full implementation.5 It is perfectly understandable why the Commission took action, judging the situation to be a good opportunity for putting the Swedish method of implementation to the test - and, if possible, eradicating it.The Swedish government responded with two arguments.The first was that consumers ran no risk whatever of not being made aware of their rights, since legislative history in Sweden is easily available to anyone wishing to consult it.The second argument was that the use of legislative history is an essential part of Swedish statutory interpretation, just as it is in other Nordic countries (it is no coincidence that in this case Sweden was supported by both Denmark and Finland). Sweden thus referred to a tradition regarded as being somewhat of a deviation compared with other legal orders, for in Nordic countries legislative history is considered to be important enough to constitute a source of law in its own right. Considering these arguments, and the fact that the annex with the list of contract terms were not binding in themselves compared with the provisions of the directive proper, the position of the Commission was harder to justify. Obviously the Commission adopted the stance that any conscious use of legislative history by the Swedish legislator, regardless of the degree of normativity of the EU material in question, constituted a threat against EU law.This categorical rejection of legislative history is not an isolated phenomenon. On the contrary, it enjoys steady support by judges, lawyers and legal scholars in several r i chard nordqu i st 197 5 Case 143/83 Commission v. Denmark.
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