European Court of Justice and preliminary reference procedure today: national judges, please behave!

Abstract

The preliminary ruling procedure seems at present to be a victim of its own success. The statistics published by the ECJ show that over the past twenty years there has been an exponential increase of the requests for a preliminary ruling, resulting in an overload for the ECJ and in the lengthening of the period for issuing decisions on preliminary rulings. In order to buck the trend and improve its efficiency the ECJ adopted in 2012 new Rules of Procedure and certain amendments to its Statute. Nonetheless an ever increasing quantity of requests for a preliminary ruling is threatening the Court of Justice and forcing it to use more and more often those ‘filtering mechanisms’ introduced in its case-law, and now incorporated into the Rules of Procedure , in order to avoid artificial or fictitious preliminary references and unnecessary case-load.