95
Second working session — The impact
procedure for the European citizen’ (
4
). And indeed, this has now become a
frequently posed type of preliminary question: ‘Is national legal norm X com-
patible with EU law norm Y?’
The two categories of preliminary questions inaugurated by
Van Gend en
Loos
(whether an EC law norm had direct effect, and whether a national norm
was compatible with EC law) came in addition to another category of prelimi-
nary questions which was, in fact, the ‘innocuous’ kind that the drafters of
the EEC Treaty probably had in mind: when national judges are asked to ap-
ply a norm of national law which is of European origin (for example, because
it transposes a provision of an EU directive), they may have some difficulty
in understanding its meaning and, in such cases, they can ask the Court of
Justice for help. This is a mechanism of judicial cooperation which operates
quite apart from any possible contradiction between the national and EU law
norm.
So we have, since
Van Gend en Loos
, three types of questions which na-
tional courts pose in the framework of the preliminary reference on inter-
pretation of EU law (
5
): (a) ‘pure’ questions of interpretation of EU law; (b)
questions about the direct effect of an EU law norm, or about other factors
that may affect its application by the national court; and (c) the question of
compatibility between EU law and national law, as part of Pescatore’s ‘citizens’
infringement procedure’ (
6
). I will now look, in turn, at each of these three cat-
egories and at their current relevance in the activity of the Court of Justice by
drawing upon some very recent preliminary rulings on interpretation. I will
do this in reverse order, as it is quite evident that the main use made, today, of
the preliminary reference is as a citizens’ infringement procedure.
(
4
) P. Pescatore, ‘
Van Gend en Loos
, 3 February 1963 – A View from Within’, in M. Poiares
Maduro and L. Azoulai (eds),
The Past and Future of EU Law: The Classics of EU Law
Revisited on the 50
th
Anniversary of the Rome Treaty
(2010).
(
5
) I do not consider, obviously, the very different kinds of questions posed by national courts
in preliminary references on the
validity
of EU law.
(
6
) Of course, national courts can pose more than one type of question within a single reference.
They can even ask all three types within one single case. See for example the questions posed
by the Administrative Court of Varna in the recent Case C-142/12,
Marinov,
judgment of 8
May 2013
(cf. paragraph 23).
