Fighting Non-Compliance with EU Equality and Social Policies: Which Remedies?
This chapter presents in brief the EU"s policy geared towards equality issues, both with regard to gender and more broadly. It then discusses (non-) compliance with EU law as a major problem and presents potential remedies. The latter are tailor-made on the basis of findings from two large-scale research projects on EU policy implementation, in the "old" EU15 plus later four countries from Central and Eastern Europe: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia. Going beyond the traditional "compliance" debate that is ongoing in various journals and geared towards a specialized political science sub-community, this contribution focuses on the wider social reform issues arising from the finding that there are serious compliance problems almost everywhere in the EU, particularly when enforcement and application of the equality and working time standards are considered and not only formal "transposition" into domestic law.