In an infringement proceedings case brought by the EFTA Surveillance Authority (ESA) against Norway, the EFTA Court has ruled in Case E-14/23, ESA v Norway (Pension portability) on 2 July 2024 that Norway has failed to fully transpose the Pension Portability Directive into national law.
The case refers to Norway’s failure to adopt national law to incorporate/transpose Directive 2014/50 on minimum requirements for enhancing worker mobility between Member States by improving the acquisition and preservation of supplementary pension rights, following the Decision of the EEA Joint Committee (188/2014), which amended Annex VI (Social Security) to the EEA Agreement.
Directive 2014/50 is essentially a ‘pension portability’ measure is designed to facilitate the exercise by persons of the right to freedom of movement of persons throughout the EEA by reducing the obstacles created by certain rules concerning supplementary pension schemes linked to an employment relationship.
This specific dispute began in 2018 when the ESA first wrote to Norway stating that it had not transposed the Directive. Whilst correspondence went back and forth between the parties, Norway stated in 2020 that it had partially implemented the Directive, but in 2023, the ESA decided to proceed with an infringement procedure before the EFTA Court, as per its powers under Article 31 SCA.
The ESA chosen to limit the substantive scope of its application for a declaration of the EFTA to the issue of the failure by Norway to implement and to notify implementation of Article 4(1)(c) of the Directive, which states,
‘The Member States shall take all necessary steps to ensure that…where an outgoing worker has not yet acquired vested pension rights when the employment relationship is terminated, the supplementary pension scheme shall reimburse the contributions paid by the outgoing worker, or paid on behalf of the outgoing worker, in accordance with national law or collective agreements or contracts, or, where the outgoing worker bears the investment risk, either the sum of the contributions made or the investment value arising from these contributions.’
Norway acknowledges that it has not yet implemented this provision into national law, and accordingly, the EFTA Court had no hesitation in beclaring that the EFTA-EEA state had,
‘fail[ed] to fully implement the act referred to at point 6 of Annex VI to the EEA Agreement into its internal legal order.‘ (para. 28).
The judgment of the EFTA Court in Case E-14/23, ESA v Norway (Pension portability), which was delivered on 2 July 2024, is available here.