GENESIS AND NEGOTIATION OF THE REFORM OF THE JURISDICTIONAL ARCHITECTURE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION

Abstract

Since September 1, 2024, the General Court of the European Union officially shares, with the Court of Justice, the jurisdiction to rule, for preliminary rulings, on questions submitted by the courts of the Member States of the Union under the Article 267 TFEU. Although such a sharing of jurisdiction is not, in itself, surprising insofar as it is provided for by the Treaties, it nevertheless took more than twenty years for the possibility, for the General Court, to process requests for preliminary rulings in specific matters to become a reality. Several reforms had to be carried out and numerous obstacles had to be overcome before the Union legislator gave its agreement to this development, which constitutes, in several respects, one of the most important developments in the jurisdictional architecture of the Union since the creation of the General Court in 1988.
After recalling the genesis of this reform and the elements which played a determining role in the decision of the Court of Justice to formulate a formal request for amendment of Protocol No. 3 on the statute of the Court of Justice of the European Union, the author retraces the main stages of the processing of this request by the Parliament, the Council and the Commission and highlights the role played by each actor in this process and the questions they raised. This overview allows us to better understand the scope of this reform and the provisions inserted in the Statute and the procedural regulations of the two jurisdictions, at the same time as it sheds light on the reasons underlying the progress made in areas not covered by the request of the Court of Justice, such as the participation of Union institutions in preliminary ruling procedures or the making available to the public of all the documents relating to these procedures.