As a fundamental instrument for ensuring the functioning of the European Union legal order, the action for the non-compliance with the European obligations is the judicial instrument by which the Union authorities, led by the Commission and the Luxembourg jurisdictional structure, exercise direct control over the conduct of the Member States in relation to EU law imperatives. Located somewhere in the middle between the legality control and the action for liability, the non-compliance with the obligations raises separate and complex issues difficult to understand in the absence of the vast jurisdictional experience of the Court of Justice of the European Union. If, under procedural terms, the present action does not present particular challenges, imposing, as a rule, a mechanism for cooperation between the European Commission and the defendant Member State (as a pre-contentious phase), in which the Court of Justice often plays a subsidiary role (contentious phase), from a material point of view, the non-compliance with the European obligations involves different forms and meanings that transcend both the letter and the spirit of the treaties, even in their current form, consolidated after the Treaty of Lisbon (2009). In such a context, the present study aims to review the most frequently used meanings which the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union has given to the phrase „non-compliance with European obligations”, in the light of current regulations, past experiences and, last but not least, the aim pursued by this procedure, namely to sanction any derogation from the uniform and synchronized application of the European Union law.

Modern society is based on the predominance of organic solidarity over mechanical solidarity and, consequently, on the predominance of the law which ensures cooperation between autonomous subjects from repressive law, which sanctions, through penalty, any deviation from the standards of the common conscience. Modern society is „civilized”, i.e. it is firstly and foremost based on „civil” law, the repressive law only being exceptional, which translates into three principles: that of the subsidiarity of criminal law, that of the necessity and legality of offences and penalties, and that of the additional protection of individual freedom when the subject is criminally charged. The consequence thereof is that, in modern liberal democracies, all repressive law is criminal, that any charge which may lead to the application of a repressive sanction is a criminal charge and that the law-maker cannot assign to the administration the competence regarding the application of repressive sanctions. Under these circumstances, the transformation of some repressive norms into norms of administrative law is a violation of the fundamental principles that structure the legal order of modern liberal states. Nonetheless, this type of practice is becoming more common. In order to ensure individual freedom, this tendency must be corrected. As politicians are not willing to do so, naturally this is a task for the judicial courts, that can rely for this endeavour on the European Court of Human Rights’ constructive jurisprudence.

The additional acts do not enjoy a legal definition in the labour legislation, although some legal texts make reference thereto or the necessity of their conclusion results from the interpretation of the legal provisions. At the same time, the conclusion of the additional act to the individual labour contract is frequently used in practice. Among the measures to make the labour relations more flexible is the temporary change of the workplace at the domicile of the employee, in which situation there must be concluded an additional act to the individual labour contract. It is necessary de lege ferenda to enshrine a legal definition of the additional act in the Labour Code.