The European Court of Justice has now ruled in the long-running battle between France, Germany, Belgium, Italy and Greece on the one hand and the European Commission on the other that was nominally over the Commission’s directive that state telephone monopolies must relinquish their control of the sale of telephone equipment, but was really about the Commission’s right to assert its directives by diktat against the wishes of the governments of member countries: the court ruled that the Commission’s interpretation of Article 90 of the Treaty of Rome is correct, and will raise renewed worries that unelected bureaucrats in Brussels are imbued with dictatorial powers.
