Judicial Reach: The Ever-Expanding European Court of Justice
Judicial Reach: The Ever-Expanding European Court of Justice
Before the summer break, the European Court of Justice ruled that workers who get sick on vacation were entitled to compensatory time off with pay equal to the length of their illness. The European Union’s highest court also found in favor of a Chinese firm challenging EU anti-dumping penalties in the export to Europe of a basic herbicide chemical called glyphosate, widely used by farmers; and it told a Swiss company (Lindt) that its chocolate bunny wrapped in gold foil was not sufficiently different from other chocolate bunnies to qualify as an exclusive registered trademark. Furthermore, the court agreed to the American IT giant Microsoft Corporation’s request for a reduction from 899 million euros ($1.3 billion) to 860 million euros ($1.05 billion) of a fine imposed earlier by a lower court in a complicated 2007 anti-trust case.
After years in the shadows, the Luxembourg-based, two-tier European court system—the Court of Justice (ECJ) and the General Court (previously called the Court of First Instance), as distinct from the European Courts of Human Rights in Strasbourg—has emerged as what Lord Mance, a leading British judge, calls “a central achievement of the European Union, a court with unparalleled transnational power.”
That power has grown even as the European Union has increased in size to twenty-seven member states and more then five hundred million citizens for whom the court’s rulings are not only legally binding but have precedence over national laws where the two are in conflict. Because the EU is a body based on the rule of law, the courts are a necessary judicial oversight to ensure that the member states and the institutions concerned—for example, the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm in Brussels—act in accordance with the signed treaties, most recently the 2007 Lisbon Treaty, in effect the EU constitution.
That the courts play a significant role in the European Union is reflected in their sizable caseload. Last year, the ECJ completed six hundred and thirty-eight cases, its largest number to date and twelve percent more than in 2007; but it has a backlog of eight hundred and forty-nine cases pending, or fifteen percent more than four years earlier.