It has started proceedings at the European Court of Justice.
Know your enemy. So, GB has a 'permanent seat' in this thing (I'd be seeing red if I was from say Holland or Romania, but that's by the way I guess in EU affairs). So let's see how one of the big chief's 'legal action' goes. Over to you - "Eleanor Sharpston QC"
The European Court Of Justice (ECJ)
The ECJ is also in Luxembourg and acts as the EU’s supreme court, upholding EU laws, assisted by a lower court, the General Court (called the Court Of First Instance until 2009), which was established by the Single European Act. As with the Commission, member states send one person to serve (though for six years).
In addition, eight advocates-general, the court’s highest advisers, deliver legal opinion. Five are usually from Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the UK, with the remaining three posts passed around the 22 smaller countries. (Never let it be
said that the EU is a stitch-up that favours the bigger kids in the playground.) As with the judges themselves, the advocates-general tend not to be eurosceptics: the UK’s is Eleanor Sharpston QC. It was she who, before her appointment, had
prosecuted the Metric Martyrs in the UK. Who sits with her?
According to the writer Mary Ellen Synon, “Vassilios Skouris, the Greek president of the ECJ… is typical of what can pass for a ‘judge’ in Europe. He is an academic who never worked as a judge until he was appointed to the ECJ in 1999. After just four years’ experience on the euro-bench, he was made president of the court. A Finn, Allan Rosas, was never a judge until appointed to the ECJ. The same goes with the Belgian Koen Lenaerts and the Pole Jerzy Makarczyk, who was an academic, an author, a government minister and then head of the Polish delegation at the UN before he was appointed to the ECJ, his
first job as a judge. The Hungarian Endre Juhasz was a bureaucrat and diplomat until he was appointed to the ECJ in 2004.”
At the ECJ cases are heard by a “full court” of 13 judges, or by three or five judges. It rules on cases concerning individuals or companies (eg fining Microsoft), countries (eg if one refuses to buy the other’s beef, say – “infringement proceedings”), and other EU institutions (usually the Commission). Its decisions are binding, there is never leave to appeal, and the Courts of Appeal in England and Wales are subordinate to it. In this country, “the highest court in the land” is in fact in Luxembourg City. The ridiculous new Supreme Court in London is subordinate to it.
The ECJ sees its role as interpreting the spirit of the treaties as well as their letter, and defined its purpose in 1960 by saying that it sought to enable “the Community interests enshrined in the Treaty of Rome to prevail over the inertia and
resistance of member states” [emphasis added]. It’s this institution that will decide, among many other things, if Britain’s “opt-outs” from the Lisbon Treaty are worthless or not. If you’re running a sweepstake on how long it is until we’re
dragged into line, keep buying a ticket until you draw “Very soon indeed”. In The Daily Mail, 21 January 2009, Roman Herzog, a former president of Germany, warned that the ECJ
“systematically ignores fundamental principles of the Western interpretation of law” and “invents legal principles that serve as grounds for later judgments”. He described the reasons given by the ECJ for a judgment on age discrimination as a fabrication”, arguing “to put it bluntly, with this onstruction, which the ECJ more or less pulled out of a hat, they were acting not as part of the judicial power but as the legislature”.
In 2008 a £500million refit doubled the space of the ECJ, gave it a pair of 100m towers and a golden-gauze indoor canopy, which resembles a mosquito net or a jellyfish and shrouds the main court.
The ECJ is often confused with the European Court of Human Rights (see “Council Of Europe” in “What the EU isn’t”) and the UN’s International Court Of Justice in The Hague (“the World Court” or ICJ) as well as the newer International Criminal Court (ICC), which is also based in The Hague but, like the European parliament, seems to sit anywhere.
