Application of the Principle of Legal Certainty to Legal Relations in the field of Customs by the Court of Justice of the European Union and the Court of the Eurasian Economic Union

Abstract

The principle of legal certainty, according to which the established rules should allow interested parties to clearly understand the scope of the obligations imposed on them, has found wide application in the practice of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and the Court of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU Court) on customs legal relations. The CJEU and the EAEU Court not only use this principle as an additional method of argumentation, but also as an independent basis for monitoring the legality of secondary law acts adopted by the bodies of these integration associations. As the analysis of the practice of the CJEU shows, this principle has two main aspects: material, expressed in the requirement of clarity of the act, and temporal, associated primarily with the prohibition of retroactive effect of the EU act. At the same time, within the framework of the material aspect, the EU Court draws attention not only to the absence of internal contradictions in the act, but also to compliance with the requirement to publish the act and to indicate the legal framework. In the practice of the EAEU Court (and earlier the EurAsEC Court) on customs legal relations, compliance with the principle of legal certainty is checked in terms of clarity and consistency of the Commission’s decisions. As the practice of the EAEU Court devoted to the classification of certain types of goods shows, a violation of these requirements may be a consequence of both the confusion in the content of one classification decision of classification features characteristic of different commodity items, and the absence in the classification decision of the necessary classification features that allow distinguishing the goods subject to classification in different commodity items. In these cases, non-compliance with the requirement of legal certainty serves as an unconditional basis for recognizing the Commission’s decisions as inconsistent with the law of the Union.