Increasing Legal Certainty without Trust: Why Regulation 2019/515 Cannot Achieve the Unachievable

More than 40 years after Cassis de Dijon, the mutual recognition in the field of goods is still a failure. The promise of this principle for ensuring both market access and regulatory diversity has not been kept. Therefore, today, businesses rarely rely on mutual recognition to sell their products in another Member State. In an attempt to stimulate this procedure further, the European Union legislator tried to simplify the procedures to be followed by businesses and public administrations through Regulation 2019/515. This article argues that, although the Regulation creates more legal certainty, it fundamentally fails to address the underlying problem of lack of trust that has stalled mutual recognition in the past.