The legal effect of EU Regulations

The EU institutions are increasingly addressing harmonisation by means of regulation rather than the traditional use of directives. This is particularly impacting areas such as data protection, financial services regulation and European standardisation in Information and Communications Technology. More broadly, using directly applicable regulations which may have horizontal and vertical direct effect rather than directives has important administrative and constitutional implications for their application in national law and impacts on Member States' discretion to implement supplementary legislation which falls within the remit of the regulation in question. This is of particular concern where governments implement policies which might be in contravention of these rules. This may be the case in relation to the UK government's public procurement policy which mandates royalty free standards rather than royalty bearing standards with the option for the licence holder to licence royalty free.