Summary

The rapid development of European Union law and the rise of the horizontal applicability of supreme legal norms (e.g. fundamental rights) were among the most noteworthy developments on the legal landscape during the second half of the 20th century. Originally, European Union law was not directly applicable, and even after the European Court of Justice developed the principle of direct applicability in its case law, the traditional view held that some of the most important provisions of the founding treaties – the internal market freedoms – and EU directives could not be directly applicable to relations between private individuals. The case law of the Court has however refuted this position and has broadened the extent of the horizontal applicability of European Union law, that is, its effect on relations between private individuals. Currently, it is held that both primary and secondary European Union law can have horizontal direct effect. In this article, the author analyses the direct applicability of EU directives, of which the extent is unclear and which gives rise to significant theoretical and practical difficulties. No clear answer has yet been found to the question of whether directives are horizontally directly applicable. The primary problem is evident: in the case of direct application, a legal norm will inevitably be applied to the detriment of some private individual. Little has been written on this issue in Estonian legal literature, despite the fact that this has been analysed already for many decades in Western Europe.