The Gazette 1975

European Section THE ROLE AND FUNCTION OF THE EUROPEAN COURT OF JUSTICE Notes on a talk given by Advocate-General Warner inLuxembourg on 20 June 1975. By a Participant

T he full name of the European Court of Justice is "the Court of Justice of the European Communities". Of course many of us like to think of a single European Community comprising the nine Member States. But in fact there are three Communities, The European Coal and Steel Community, The European Economic Community, and the European Atomic Energy Com- munity. Each of the nine Member States belongs to each of the three. The first, and the oldest, of the Communities is the European Coal and Steel Community, set up in 1952 by the Treaty of Paris. It was this Treaty that actually created the Court, as the Court of Justice ,of the European Coal and Steel Community, and for the first few years of its existence the only jurisdiction the Court had was the jurisdiction conferred on it by that Treaty. But that was not negligible. Nor indeed is it negligible today. Since becoming a member of the Coal and Steel Community Ireland has not litigated any case under that Treaty, the United Kingdom of Great Britain has however litigated two cases— Miles Druce & Co. Ltd. v. The Commission, Guest, Keen & Nettlefolds Ltd. (1974) E.C.R. 281, the latter intervening, and they had another since: Johnson & Firth Brown Ltd. v. The Commission, the British Steel Corporation in- tervening. The other two Communities are the European Eco- nomic Community and the European Atomic Energy Community (commonly referred to as E.E.C. & Eura- tom respectively). People tend to talk about " the Treaty of Rome". There are in fact two Treaties of Rome one establishing the European Economic Com- munity and the other Euratom. They both came into force on 1st January 1958, and one of their effects was that, as from that date, what had been the Court of Justice of the European Coal and Steel Community became the Court of Justice of the European Com- munities Essential documents Broadly speaking the instruments that lay down the organization, jurisdiction and procedure of the Court are: (1) the Articles concerning the Court in the founding Treaties themselves—that is the Treaty of Paris and the two Treaties of Rome; (2) the Protocols on the Statute of the Court annexed to those Treaties; (3) the provisions relating to the Court in the various instruments whereby Denmark, Ireland and the UK became members of the Communities—what these mainly do is to amend the relevant Articles of the founding Treaties so as to adapt them to a Community of nine instead of six; and (4) the Rules and Procedure of the Court.

Anyone conducting litigation before the Court must of course be armed with copies of those instruments, particularly the Treaties, the Protocols on the Statute and the Rules of Procedure. They all exist in the seven official languages of the Communities, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Irish and Italian. If you happen to know any of the Community languages other than Irish and English, it is useful to be armed with copies in that or those languages too, because a com- parison of the texts in different languages sometimes helps to make clearer what a particular provision means. At present the working language of the Court is French. Before dealing with the functions of the Court and with its procedure, a word about its composition and its infrastructure. The Treaties currently provide for the Court to have nine Judges, four Advocates-General and a Registrar. T hey also provide for the President of the Court to be elected by the Judges from among their number for a term of three years; that he may be re-elected; and for the Court to appoint the Registrar. There is no provision in the Treaties about what the nationalities of these various people are to be. So far as the Treaties are concerned all fourteen of them could come from one Member State, or indeed from a non- Member State! In practice there is one Judge from each Member State. The Irish Judge is of course the former President of the High Court, Judge Andreas O'Kfeeffe. There is one Advocate-General from each of the four Member States with a population in excess of 50,000,000 people, that is France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. At the moment the President is the French Judge, Monsieur Lecourt. He was re-elected in October 1973 for a third term, which is the first time any President has been re-elected for a third term. What matters in the case of the President is not his nationality. It is the man. The Registrar is a Belgian, Mr. Albert Van Houtte. He has been the Registrar of the Court ever since its creation as the Court of Justice of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952. His responsibilities are enormous because he is not only responsible for the Registry, which deals with the judicial paper work, he is also responsible for the administration of the Court. All in all he is the head of a staff of some 240 people. You may wonder why such a large staff. There are two main reasons. The Staff of the Court One is that the Court is a self-administering institu- tion. There is no Minister for Justice, no Minister for Finance, no Office of Public Works, or no Civil Service . 3 0 5