General Principles Of EU Financial Services Law

EU financial services law is the model of contemporary legal framework of integration of financial services market, whose general principles have great influence on multilateral financial services trade systems and international financial regulations, and implications for China's financial regulation. As such, this paper makes an introduction of the emergence, formation, development and perfection of EU financial services law, explores the conceptions of its general principles, elaborates their scope of application and conditions, effect, relations and history, assesses their implementation, and makes a thorough comparison of the principles among EU, WTO and NAFTA services laws.Chapter I first casts an overview to the sources and system of EU financial services law, its historical background and characters. As a legal system based on the fundamental economic freedoms of EC Treaty, EU financial services law is composed of a series of regulation, directives and dicesions as well as ECJ's case law. It sets harmonized norms for Member States's financial regulation in the banking, securities and investment services and insurance insustries. EU financial services law has been developing in the context of European integration and financial globalization. Negative and positive, centralized and decentralizaed integration approaches have been succefully employed in this process.Chapter II discusses the fundamentals, main requirements, direct effect and scope of application of the principle of freedom of establishment and to provide services. The principle of freedom of establishment and freedom to provide services originates from the general prohibitive provisions of EC Treaty. It may be applied to different means of cross-border services. While the two freedoms are the legal base of those second level principles, they are also dierectly applicable and amount to the most effective instruments for the EU financial markets integration. Both discriminatory and non-discriminatory restrictive measures are covered by the two freedoms. In particular, all national rules, notwithstanding they come from the spheres of public law, mandatory private law and law of conflicts of laws, as well as those conflict rules embodied in Rome Convention and related insurance directives shall be compatible with the freedom to provide services.Chaper III detailedly describes the concept and methods of harmonization, the scope of minimal harmonization in financial directives and the development of the principle of minimal harmonization in EU financial services law. The principle of minimal between harmonization aims at the approximation of essential financial requirements between Member States. It dose not achieve to build a fully integrated national regulatory standards,...