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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
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