100
Bruno De Witte
Deuxième séance de travail — Les retombées
whether national courts should be empowered to stay mortgage enforcement
proceedings on the ground that the mortgage contract contains unfair claus-
es (
17
). In such cases, the question posed to the CJEU is not about a substantive
incompatibility of national law with EU law obligations but about which con-
crete steps a national courts must take, or must be allowed to take, when asked
to enforce EU law in a private dispute. One could consider such questions to
be distant relatives of the question about the direct effect of Article 12 EEC
Treaty posed by the Tariefcommissie in
Van Gend en Loos.
4.
‘Pure’ Questions of Interpretation
The principal domain for the ‘pure’ questions of interpretation, i.e. the
ones that do not raise a question of compatibility of national law with EU
law, is the domain of disputes between private parties. An illustration of this
is the
Refcomp
case of 7 February 2013 (
18
). In the course of civil proceedings
on contractual liability between two private companies, the question arose
whether the French or Italian courts had jurisdiction. The Cour de Cassation,
before deciding that question, asked the Court of Justice about the meaning of
a provision of the Brussels-I Regulation on Jurisdiction and the Recognition
of Judgments which was relevant to the solution of that question. The CJEU
engaged in complex reasoning about the meaning of that EU law provision,
but at no point in the judgment was there any question about the compatibil-
ity of French law with EU law; in fact, the French courts were directly applying
an EU regulation to the jurisdictional part of the private dispute without any
intervening domestic law.
‘Pure’ questions of interpretation can, of course, also arise in public law
cases (for example, in cases involving the interpretation of the VAT direc-
tives) or in labour law cases involving the State as an employer. A recent
example of the latter is the
Kenny
case in which the High Court (Ireland)
asked whether employment practices in the Irish police force contravened the
principle of equal pay for men and women. There was no dispute about the
EU-compatibility of Irish employment laws, but only about the employment
practices of the Irish Department of Justice in respect of different categories of
employees in the police force (
19
).
(
17
) Case C-415/11,
Aziz
, judgment of 14 March 2013.
(
18
) Case C-543/10,
Refcomp,
judgment of 7 February 2013.
(
19
) Case C-427/11,
Kenny and Others,
judgment of 28 February 2013.
