Judgment_paragraph 24 · C-32/02

24In support of its arguments, the Commission draws attention to the case-law of the Court on the scope of Council Directive 77/187/EEC of 14 February 1977 on the approximation of the laws of the Member States relating to the safeguarding of employees' rights in the event of transfers of undertakings, businesses or parts of businesses (OJ 1977 L 61, p. 26), as amended by Council Directive 98/50/EC of 29 June 1998 (OJ 1998 L 201, p. 88), and codified by Council Directive 2001/23/EC of the Council of 12 March 2001 (OJ 2001 L 82, p. 16). It claims that Directive 77/187 refers constantly to ‘undertaking’ and ‘entrepreneur’ which have a somewhat commercial connotation, but makes clear in Article l(l)(c), in the version resulting from Directive 98/50, that it ‘shall apply to public and private undertakings engaged in economic activities whether or not they are operating for gain’. This new provision was a result of Case C-29/91 Redmond Stichting [1992] ECR I-3189, paragraphs 3 and 4, and Case C-382/92 Commission v United Kingdom [1994] ECR I-2435. The Commission points out that in the latter the Court found that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland had failed to fulfil its obligations by excluding non-profitmaking undertakings from the scope of the national regulations implementing Directive 77/187, holding in paragraph 45 of the judgment that the fact that an undertaking is engaged in non-profitmaking activities is not in itself sufficient to deprive such activities of their economic character or to remove the undertaking from the scope of the directive.