(1)

By Regulation (EC) No 930/2004, the Council decided that, by way of derogation from Regulation No 1 and for a transitional period of three years beginning on 1 May 2004, the institutions of the Union would not be bound by the obligation to draft all acts in Maltese and to publish them in that language in the Official Journal of the European Union.

(2)

On that occasion, the Council agreed, in Article 2 of the said Regulation, that not later than 30 months after its adoption, the Council would review the operation of that Regulation and determine whether to extend it for a further period of one year.

(3)

Since the start of the transitional period, the situation as regards translation from and into Maltese has improved considerably, so that an extension of the temporary derogation measures is not justified. By Decision of 24 October 2006, the Council accordingly decided that there were no grounds for such an extension. The transitional period will therefore come to an end on 30 April 2007.

(4)

However, Article 3 of the said Regulation stipulates that, at the end of the transitional period, all acts which at that time have not already been published in the Maltese language are also to be published in that language; it would nevertheless appear to be very difficult for all those acts to be translated and published immediately after 30 April 2007. Article 3 should therefore be amended in order to give the institutions a further space of time to enable them to absorb the backlog of all the acts that will not have been published in Maltese by the end of the transitional period,