Fair Trials will, in due course, be publishing a separate Toolkit on this measure. However, you may wonder whether how can already use the Access to a Lawyer Directive at this stage. For that purpose, we review below some relevant case-law before setting out some examples from three Member States in which the Directives has been used in litigation, as you may wish to do with the Access to a Lawyer Directive. 1. Review of relevant CJEU cases a. Kolpinguis In an early case, Kolpinguis,21 in response to the first two questions referred, the CJEU22 restated existing principles according to which a directive cannot be relied upon against an individual (as they bind only the Member States to which they are addressed) and that the duty of conforming interpretation, though it required existing legislation to be read in line with the Directive, could not aggravate criminal liability of an individual absent specific implementing measures. (The CJEU was thereby telling the Dutch authorities they could not prosecute someone for selling tap water combined with gas as ‘mineral water’ on the basis of a directive excluding the sale of water not derived from a spring as mineral water, when those authorities had not at the time of the acts in question adopted implementing laws.) It then dealt with a question asking whether a difference arose if the directive in question had not reached its transposition deadline,23 to which it responded: ‘The question whether the provisions of a directive may be relied upon as such before a national court arises only if the Member State concerned has not implemented the directive in national law within the prescribed period or has implemented the directive incorrectly. The first two questions were answered in the negative. However, it makes no difference to those answers if on the material date the period which the Member State had in which to adapt national law had not yet expired. As regards the third question concerning the limits which Community law might impose on the obligation or power of the national court to interpret the rules of its national law in the light of the directive, it makes no difference whether or not the period prescribed for implementation has expired’ (paragraph 15). Though the case is interesting, the point about pre-deadline effects of the directive was essentially academic: the CJEU had found that a directive could not be relied upon against an individual to aggravate their criminal liability in any event, such that it (literally) did not make a difference whether the directive was past its transposition deadline at the time the state sought to do so. But it is also true that the CJEU did not say in terms that the duty of conforming interpretation could not apply prior to the transposition deadline. 21 Case 80/86 Kolpinghuis Nijmegen, ECLI:EU:C:1987:431. For judgments prior to 1 December 2009, the correct term should be the ‘Court of Justice of the European Communities’ but we use the same acronym of ‘CJEU’ to avoid confusion. 23 The directive in question was notified on 17 July 1980, making its transposition deadline 17 July 1984, and the offences in question took place in August 1984, so the issue did not actually arise. The national court may have thought the notification to have taken place upon publication in the Official Journal on 30 August 1980, which it may have understood to make the transposition deadline 30 August 1984, which would have led it to ask whether the state could rely on the directive against the individual prior to its transposition deadline. 22 13