Article 1 of the EU directive 2000/84/EC on DST says:

For the purposes of this Directive "summer-time period" shall mean the period of the year during which clocks are put forward by 60 minutes compared with the rest of the year.

And the point (2) of the preamble says:

(2) Given that the Member States apply summer-time arrangements, it is important for the functioning of the internal market that a common date and time for the beginning and end of the summer-time period be fixed throughout the Community.


The interpretation by lawyers who gave their positive opinion about this bill is that the EU directive does not explicitly mandate DST. Its purpose is to regulate DST start and end dates given that DST is observed in member countries. The directive does not say whether this assumption must be valid for all countries. If a country does not observe DST, then there is no such thing as "the period of the year during which clocks are put forward by 60 minutes compared with the rest of the year" in that country, which means there is no summer-time and the directive simply does not apply.

This interpretation seems reasonable to me. I would expect that if DST were mandatory in all member countries, the directive would have an article stating this in clear text. I would welcome a link to a EU document which explicitly states/concludes that DST is mandatory.

By the way, the bill was actually proposed by a party from the opposition (PSL), not by government, and it was supposedly accepted by all members of the committee, which are from all parties.


Thanks,
Sergiusz



On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 7:03 AM, Martin Burnicki <martin.burnicki@meinberg.de> wrote:
Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
> Sergiusz Wolicki said:
>> The bill is not considered conflicting with EU regulations, which only
>> require DST changes to be synchronized across EU but do not actually
>> mandate the use of DST.
>
> Hmm.
>
> Article 2 says "From 2002 onwards, the summer-time period shall begin, in
> every Member State, at 1.00 a.m., Greenwich Mean Time, on the last Sunday
> in March."
>
> It doesn't say "Where a member state observes a summer-time period, ...".
>
> Article 1 similarly doesn't use wording like "where applied".
>
> The literature on the topic on the EU site all seems to assume that having
> summer time is mandatory.
>
> If I tried hard I could probably bring an argument to the opposite forward,
> but I suspect a court would throw it out.

The current government of Poland doesn't seem to care much about EU
regulations anyway, e.g.:
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/poland-accused-of-ignoring-eu-ruling-on-protected-forest-logging/

So why should they obey the EU rules on DST? :(

Martin