Clear, Simple, and Precise Legislative Drafting: How Does a European Community Directive Fare?
* BJuris, LLB (Mon), PhD (Melb), Grad Dip FamL, Grad Dip Ed (Mon), MACE, Senior Lecturer in Law, School of Law, Faculty of Business and Law, Victoria University (Melbourne), Barrister at Law (Victoria and NSW), Australia; edwin.tanner{at}vu.edu.au.
In 2001, Martin Cutts redrafted Toy-Safety Directive 88/378/EEC1 in plain language. He criticized the language of that Directive as being archaic legalese.2 He added that Directives, as a whole, were poorly drafted.3 The European Commissions Legal Service rejected his criticisms. It stated that it had published the European Commission’s plain language guidelines4 after Directive 88/378/EEC had been drafted. In a previous article in the Statute Law Review,5 Butt and Castle’s6 plain language guidelines were explicated using examples from Directive 2002/2/EC.7 In this article, their guidelines are applied to the whole of that Directive to see if its language is ‘clear, simple, and precise’.8 The criticisms made in the previous article,9 combined with those made in this article, suggest that the drafters of Directive 2002/2/EC10 have not yet mastered the skill of writing in ‘clear, simple, and precise’ language.