168
Marta Cartabia
Troisième séance de travail — Les perspectives
national judges. This is all the more important in constitutional adjudication,
where delicate choices of value are often at stake (
28
).
Indeed, as in the 1950s, the primary concern today is for the rights of the
individual. However, a mismatch between stronger protection of individual
rights and a multiplication of judicial procedures is to be avoided. Better pro-
tection is a matter of the quality of decisions, not a quantitative matter of the
number of available appeals.
In our times, when the junctures between the courts involved in the
European judicial network are under revision, some important priorities are
to be taken into account, such as, for example, the need to avoid conflicts
on fundamental rights; a more rational distribution of the workload among
courts; securing an acceptable degree of harmonisation throughout the conti-
nent while preserving constitutional pluralism in Europe; the limitation of the
number of repetitive judgments on the same case, and many others.
The principle of subsidiarity may provide some guidance to this end.
Briefly, whereas the post-World War II ‘age of rights’ was an age of distrust
– and rightly so – of national remedies, the ‘new age of rights’ we are living
in requires confidence and cooperation between courts, for the sake of the
system and for the sake of a better satisfaction of individual expectations of
justice.
(
28
) M. Rosenfeld,
Comparing constitutional review by the European Court of Justice and the U.S.
Supreme Court
, in
International Journal of Constitutional Law,
2006, 618-651, p. 628.
