Summary

In the case of directives adopted by European Union legislators, we can talk about central instruments for the implementation of European Union policies, used for the harmonization of the complex and voluminous legal orders of the Member States. At the same time, the nature and impact of the directive on national law continues to be unclear. On the one hand, the directive as an instrument does not match the immediate impact doctrine of the European Union Law in its nature because it achieves its full impact only after the deadline for transposition. On the other hand, the European Court of Justice acknowledged the possibility of the immediate application of the directive in its case law already after the directive entered into force.

The author believes that Estonian legal literature has not addressed the impact of the directive that entered into force during the transition period on the legal order, institutions, and individuals of the Member State. Obscurity also dominates in regards to extent of the impact and its possible consequences. Considering this, the author analyses these aspects through the prism of legislative, executive, and judicial power. To ensure that the treatment of the existence of the impact of the directive, its scope, and the outcomes would not remain merely legal theoretical, the author of the article examines public procurement legislation. In this article, the author focuses only on one public procurement directive, the so-called classic procurement directive.