EU Law Blog

We have been talking about whether enforcement actions are (consistently) effective. Today, Advocate General Poiares Maduro proposes a daily fine of EUR 265,500 for Italy (the Commission had asked for a fine of Eur 309,750 per day) for its failure to comply with a 2001 judgment of the ECJ:

On 26 June 2001, in Case C-212/99 Commission v Italy, the Court found Italy to have failed to fulfil its obligations under the provisions of the EC Treaty guaranteeing free movement of workers, by not guaranteeing recognition of the acquired rights of former foreign language assistants in six Italian universities (La Basilicata, Milan, Palermo, Pisa, La Sapienza in Rome and the Eastern University Institute in Naples), even though such recognition was guaranteed to Italian nationals.

The ECJ has not ruled on this question of whether the fine is appropriate and if so, how much it should be. I wonder how long it will take Italy to comply with the original judgment?

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Tomorrow we will continue to think about the relationship between the EU courts and national courts. We have learned that the EU’s court system is different from that in the US. There are EU courts but there isn’t a whole system of EU courts distributed throughout the EU (no equivalent to federal district courts and federal courts of appeals). As a practical matter the ECJ/CFI operate under severe resource constraints. In addition, EU legislation works differently from US federal legislation, and that has implications for jurisdiction.

Let’s consider an example. If Bill in Florida wants to complain that he has been defrauded by Ted he has a claim under state law which will (usually) be heard in state court. Diversity would make a difference but there is no equivalent in the EU system, although there are rules which are applied to decide which state’s courts have jurisdiction over the dispute. There is a European Judicial Network on Civil and Commercial Matters with a website which helps people decide where and how they should bring their claims.

There’s more.
(more…)

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Political leaders in Austria and Denmark have recently criticised the ECJ, suggesting that it has overstepped its bounds (via euobserver):

Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on Wednesday according to Der Standard “We all easily have the feeling that there [at the ECJ], decisions are being taken of which the basis of the judgements do not fully correspond with what we have agreed as the political basis of the development of the EU.”
Without mentioning concrete examples, Mr Rasmussen indicated “I keep a critical eye on the court.”
The statements from Copenhagen echo remarks made by Mr Schussel last week, who said that “the ECJ…has in the last couple of years systematically expanded European competencies, even in areas, where there is decidedly no [European] community law.”
The Austrian leader called for the debate on the future of the EU to focus not only on the fate of the EU constitution but also on the role of the EU’s top court.

This week, as we listen to and read about the Alito confirmation hearings, questions about the role of Justices of the Supreme Court in interpreting the Constitution are in the air. Similar issues clearly arise in the context of the EU’s treaty-based system. The ECJ has often acted in an “activist” way but political negotiations about amendments to the treaties haven’t tended to focus too much on the role of the ECJ in the past.

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