Transcript Legislation
Legislation Drafting guidelines and tools Types of EU legislation • EU: primary legislation – treaties – international agreements • EU: secondary legislation – binding: regulations, directives, decisions – non-binding: recommendation, opinions Binding instruments • Regulation: general application, binding in all Member States, no need for national authorities to do anything • Directive: binding but Member States decide how to implement • Decision: binding for those to whom it applies EU principles • The drafting of a legislative act must be: – clear, easy to understand and unambiguous – simple, concise, containing no unnecessary elements – precise, leaving no uncertainty in the mind of the reader – appropriate to type of act and addressee – succinct, internally consistent and consistent with other legislation EU: multilingualism “Throughout the process leading to their adoption, draft acts shall be framed in terms and sentence structures which respect the multilingual nature of Community legislation; concepts or terminology specific to any one national legal system are to be used with care” . Translation issues 1. 2. “The original text must be particularly simple, clear and direct, since any over-complexity or ambiguity, however slight, could result in inaccuracies, approximations or real mistranslations in one or more of the other Community languages”. “The use of expressions and phrases — in particular, but not exclusively, legal terms — too specific to the author’s own language or legal system, will increase the risk of translation problems”. Structure of acts 1 • Title = info to identify act – if amending act, all acts amended need to be given by number – number, date, year – short title possible • Preamble = citations, recitals – Citation: sets out legal basis of act (e.g. treaty): ‘Having regard to …’ – Recital: reasons for/background to provisions of enacting terms : ‘Whereas…’ – numbered Structure of acts 2 • Enacting terms = legislative part: articles may be grouped in titles, chapters, sections – no non-normative statements – no reproduction or paraphrasing from other legislation – first article may define subject matter and scope of act – terms can be defined in single article at beginning Translation and drafting guides Access to language resources http://ec.europa.eu/translation/index_en.htm Interinstitutional style guide, in all languages: http://publications.europa.eu/code/en/en000500.htm Joint Practical Guide (drafting) http://eur-lex.europa.eu/en/techleg/index.htm * Fight the fog campaign Further Reading (EU) • Process and Players http://eurlex.europa.eu/en/droit_communautai re/droit_communautaire.htm#1.1 Tasks 1 1. Consult drafting guidelines: • http://eur-lex.europa.eu/en/techleg/index.htm Consult model acts (Annex – Models) from the guidelines. Compare language versions of the model acts, and make lists of common elements and structures and their equivalents. Check some actual documents to see if they follow the models: http://eur-lex.europa.eu Tasks 2 2. Go to the UN site. http://www.un.org Study the format and standard phrases in your languages for a) Security Council resolutions b) General Assembly Conventions Are the document structure and linguistic norms different from those of the EU? 3. Consult EU style and translation guides for your languages. http://ec.europa.eu/translation/index_en.htm http://publications.europa.eu/code/en/en000500.htm Institutionalization • • • • Fixed structure of text types Fixed phrases used in a certain text type Terminology specific to the institution Fixed terminological equivalents across languages • Fixed style guide for writing in a particular language • Norms of translation (explicitly stated or not)