John, I have heard you express these sorts of ideas before. Can I ask you if you have any authority you can quote to back them up? To the best of my knowledge (and that may not be all that good) the only law that can be tried in a UK is UK law (English or Scottish where they are different) The directives are not UK law. Use of the European Convention on Humans Rights was only possible when that was written into UK law. Yet you claim that you could appeal directly to the Directive in a UK court. In an e-mail to me that was not copied to the forum you stated that you could put up a defence of the inadequacy of a harmonised standard if equipment was causing interference despite conformance to the standard saying such a prosecution would be fatally flawed. Yet all the cases I have read about such as the first prosecution in the UK of computer superstores in Cardiff on 8th october 1997 the defendants were accused of contravention of specific regulations of the UK Electromagnetic compatibility regulations 1992. In this case regulations 28 and 33 with a charge of contravening regulation 34 dropped. Certainly you could appeal to a European court if you thought that the UK court had not dealt properly with you and I believe it is possible in principle for an individual to take a country to the European court for improperly applying a directive. However it is the normal principle in a court that you cannot challenge the law itself. The court decides only on the law as it is You can claim that one law that that court has competence to judge has priority over another that is within its competence but as far as I know there is not way in a court that you can challenge the sovereign right of parliament to have cast the law in the way that it did, even if it is treaty bound to implement them in another way. To the best of my knowledge it is simply not within the competence of the UK courts to judge the UK parliament's compliance with international treaties. This must be judged elsewhere If you have case history or can quote any UK statutes to the contrary John I would be very interested to hear them.
To George Alspaugh who said >I know of no national laws that take precedence over the EU Directives for >IEC/EN 60950. I would say that all of these laws take precedence over the EU Directives in the individual countries because all of them are law in those countries and the EU Directives are not law in any of them Only in the European Courts do the EU directives take precedence and those courts do not prosecute individual cases. (IEC standards by the way have no legal authority anywhere they are purely advisory for those setting standards that do have some legal authority)
