THE GROWING IMPORTANCE OF SOFT LAW IN THE EU

The objective of establishing legal order sui generis that on the EU level will, due to its flexibility and differentiation, be able to effectively respond to dynamic movements of internal market as well as to globalization challenges in general, in the last two decades lead to extensive transformations of the EU legal order. One of them is growing importance of soft law instruments and subsequent differentiation of legal regulation – to traditional regulation new modes of regulation have been added (as a result of so called “new legislative culture”). Although at first when adopting the decision, the Court of the European Union denied the recognition of existence and function of soft law, later the Court gradually adapted to differentiating trend in the EU legal order and is thus nowadays recognizing the normative value of soft law in the EU. When deriving the decision the Court is considering soft law as part of legal framework (in this case soft law is used as a ground for interpretation of hard law provision or as an instrument of confi rmation of interpretation of binding law) or it recognizes self-binding and binding effect of soft law (in this case soft instrument is a substantive rule on which the decision is grounded). With such approach, to soft law normative status is conferred; the latter – despite it being on the non-binding side – is therefore having indirect legal effect and is creating indirect legal consequences