Is Sweden’s state monopoly on the retail sale of alcohol still compatible with EU law? In recent years the Court of Justice of the EU has become more critical of such monopolies. On 14 September Dr Graham Butler (University of Aarhus) presented his SIEPS report, in which he suggests that Systembolaget’s legal justification is hanging by a thread.
State retail monopolies are generally at odds with the principles of the EU’s single market: goods are supposed to move freely from one EU Member State to another. Yet, the use of state monopolies to regulate the retail sale of alcoholic goods has a long history in the Nordic states, and in Sweden Systembolaget has a near monopoly on such retail sales.
In 1997 the Court of Justice of the EU found that the Swedish monopoly was consistent with EU law, providing certain conditions were fulfilled. Are those conditions still met, today? And would the test applied by the Court in any future challenge be the same? Butler examines how CJEU case law has developed in the intervening years, and how Swedish alcohol policy has been partly liberalised, through the advent of online sales and soon, perhaps, sales ‘at the farm-gate’.
Butler’s report concludes that Systembolaget could well be found to be incompatible with EU law, should the matter come before the court again. His findings were discussed and tested by fellow experts in EU commercial law.
A written summary of the seminar is available to download (on the right-hand side of this page).
