Public Service Obligations: Protection of Public Service Values in a National and European Context

Abstract

Terms such as ‘services in the general interest’ and ‘services of general economic interest’ have received a lot of attention from legal scholars and other practitioners of law during the course of the last decade. The same amount of attention has not been paid to the term ‘public service obligations’, which represents a common mechanism for the realisation of services of general economic interest throughout the Member States of the European Union. However, the term ‘public service obligation’ is not a thoroughly defined concept of law within the European Union and its legal framework. In this chapter, the term is traced back to its origins in French and Anglo-Saxon public administrative law and it is explained, how it is interpreted and applied in the context of EU law. Special focus is placed on the single provision dealing explicitly with public service obligations which can be found in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union namely Article 93 on State aid in EU transport law. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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