Indirect effect describes a situation where national courts are required to interpret national law in line with an unimplemented or badly implemented directive, as opposed to ignoring national law in preference to the directive as occurs when direct effect is invoked. Indirect effect arises from the failure of a member state to implement a directive—either correctly or at all—but where direct effect cannot apply because the party against whom the directive is sought to be enforced is a private entity or otherwise fails to meet the conditions which would give the directive direct effect. In Von Colson and Kamann v Land Nordrhein-Westfalen, the ECJ ruled that national courts should interpret national law in line with the directive, "in so far as it is given discretion to do so under national law". While Von Colson dealt with a situation where a member state had failed to implement a directive correctly, in Marleasing v La Comercial Internacional de Alimentacion the ECJ extended indirect effect to situations where the member state concerned had not implemented the directive at all.
Famous quotes containing the words indirect and/or effect:
“An indirect quotation we can usually expect to rate only as better or worse, more or less faithful, and we cannot even hope for a strict standard of more and less; what is involved is evaluation, relative to special purposes, of an essentially dramatic act.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“We all have—to put it as nicely as I can—our lower centres and our higher centres. Our lower centres act: they act with terrible power that sometimes destroys us; but they don’t talk.... Since the war the lower centres have become vocal. And the effect is that of an earthquake. For they speak truths that have never been spoken before—truths that the makers of our domestic institutions have tried to ignore.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)