On 17 July 2006, the European Environmental Bureau and WWF, on behalf of 17 national environmental organisations, have filed a complaint with the European Commission asking to open an infringement procedure against eleven EU Member States for failure to correctly apply the EU Water Framework Directive. Environmental NGOs say that if the ‘polluter pays’ principle continues not to be applied, citizens will have pay the whole bill and the main goal of the directive - good ecological status of all European waters by 2015 - will not be achieved.

The countries concerned by the complaint are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Poland, Sweden and The Netherlands. These countries have limited the economic appraisal to public drinking water supply and waste water treatment or collection, thus excluding infrastructures such as dams, weirs and dykes serving hydropower, navigation, agricultural irrigation and drainage and flood defence. This leads to a situation where many infrastructures already identified as a major environmental problem, will be exempted from any transparent economic assessment and citizens, who already pay substantial water prices, could be charged even higher prices to cover for the damage caused by businesses.

According to the EU Treaty, the European Commission can open an infringement procedure against EU Member States following a complaint from citizens and NGOs.

 Read the NGO press release