Brussels Sees Progress, Watchdogs Count Almost None

If your government ignores an EU recommendation on judges, corruption or journalists, nothing happens automatically. The European Commission’s annual Rule of Law Report (a yearly review of courts, anti-corruption rules, media freedom and checks on power in all 27 member states) is a monitoring tool, and the Commission’s own Q&A says it is preventive.

In July the Commission said 47% of its 2025 recommendations had been followed up, fully or partially. Watchdogs counting the same recommendations arrive at a single-digit share for full implementation.

Two numbers for one report

The Commission adds that a further 23% saw at least limited progress, and calls its assessment qualitative. Ursula von der Leyen, according to EUobserver, said the report shows “continued positive progress across many Member States”. The Commission’s own report page is more guarded: progress, it says, “is uneven”.

The Civil Liberties Union for Europe (Liberties), a rights watchdog that publishes its own gap analysis each year, finds that 93% of the 2025 recommendations repeated earlier ones and that only 7 are new in 2026, down from 8.

In July it counted 2% as fully implemented. Its October gap analysis, as EUobserver reports it, puts full implementation at 4% and limited or no progress at 54%. Germany, the largest member state, received 4 recommendations, and 3 of them show no or no further progress.

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The wording of the recommendations shows how slowly the file moves. Belgium is told to “resume work on a legislative reform to increase the transparency of lobbying”. The sentence assumes the work has stopped.

A draft law counts as progress

Laurent Pech, writing on Verfassungsblog, calls the report “a defective and overrated ‘stock-taking exercise'”. He argues that draft laws and action plans are scored as progress even if they never enter into force, and that it is unclear how the Commission defines full implementation at all. The scale has four grades, from no progress to significant progress, and the 47% in the Commission’s own wording merges full and partial follow-up into one figure.

A twelve-month horizon makes the problem worse, Pech says, because slow backsliding cannot show up in a single year. Liberties makes a related point: in its March report it found that countries with regression in checks and balances rose from nine to 13, and that the Commission made zero recommendations on the right to protest, the area with the highest regression.

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A warning system without a trigger

The Commission describes the report as a tool for dialogue and early reform. Liberties concludes that “a persistent lack of progress means the system is not working”. Unimplemented judgments of the European Court of Human Rights rose from 624 to 650, Liberties found in its March report.

The recommendations do not prejudge infringement cases or the rule-of-law conditionality for EU funds, and the report is one source of information for the conditionality regime. No automatic step follows from it. The report is the seventh annual edition.

The money link is still a proposal

The Commission points to the next EU budget as the place where the recommendations could start to matter. Under its proposal, national and regional partnership plans would have to address the challenges identified in the report, and compliance with horizontal rule-of-law conditions would be a prerequisite for support, with payments blockable if those conditions fail.

The same Q&A says there is no automatic link between the recommendations and the approval of those plans, and Liberties reports that Commissioner Henna Virkkunen made clear there would be no automaticity.

So a recommendation can be repeated for a fifth year, scored as partly followed, and still cost a government nothing.