51
Second working session — The impact
No judicial body has been set up to review, under its compulsory jurisdiction,
the conformity of the acts of Member States or of the UN political bodies as
to their conformity with the UN Charter. The fact that a tribunal – formerly
the UN Administrative Tribunal, today the UN Internal Justice System – was
established with the mandate to protect the legal rights of the employees of the
organisation belongs to a different institutional logic. Absent such an inter-
national labour court, the rule of law would have been severely compromised
through a total lack of judicial remedies.
It is true that at the European level that traditional pattern had already
been departed from to a great extent through the establishment of the CJEU,
at that time CJEC (hereinafter: the Court). However, access to the Court was
difficult. The procedure of preliminary rulings may deploy its effects only
where a party in a proceeding before a national court can show that a provi-
sion of Community law is relevant for the outcome of the proceeding – origi-
nally a fairly difficult task inasmuch as most of the treaty rules were deemed to
affect only the States parties, not conferring any direct entitlements on private
parties. Thus, large parts of the legal framework of the European integration
process remained essentially under executive influence, be it on the part of
the executive institutions of the integration process, the Commission and the
Council, or the national governments acting through informal consensus in
accordance with the general understanding of general international law. The
governments of the Member States as masters of the European legal order: this
is now a thing of the past, legally obsolete yet not totally absent in fact, as the
continuing crisis in the Euro zone has made abundantly clear where financial
power structures cast a profound shadow on the institutional decision-mak-
ing processes of the European Union.
My second point is the tremendous gain obtained by the ordinary citizen.
They have been established by
Van Gend en Loos
as guardians of the integrity
of the legal system. Whenever they feel that something is wrong “in Brussels”,
they can attempt to launch a judicial proceeding, which normally must start at
domestic level. One may call this a truly democratic achievement, already em-
phasized by Joseph Weiler in his report. Much depends in this regard on the
openings provided by the national system. National procedural codes may be
strict in requiring that a judicial action is admissible only where the claimant
can rely on a subjective entitlement, which is the case in Germany, where such
