93
Deuxième séance de travail — Les retombées
Second working session — The impact
The Impact of
Van Gend en
Loos
on Judicial Protection at
European and National Level:
Three Types of Preliminary
Questions
Bruno De Witte
PROFESSOR, MAASTRICHT UNIVERSITY
1.
Introduction: The Birth of a New Doctrine and
its Consequences for the National and European
Judiciary
The major novelty of
Van Gend en Loos
was not the discovery that EEC
law could have direct effect. Indeed, the reason why the referring Dutch court
(the Tariefcommissie) sent a request for interpretation to Luxembourg was
that the Dutch Constitution specified that treaty provisions could, depend-
ing on their terms, be self-executing within the Dutch legal order. The Dutch
court wanted to hear from the European Court of Justice whether Article 12
EEC was one such treaty provision (
1
). Many other monist legal systems, in-
side and outside Europe (most prominently, the USA since
Foster and Elam
v Neilson
in 1829), recognized the possibility for national courts to directly
enforce international treaty norms, though these courts rarely did so in prac-
tice. The crucial contribution of the 1963 judgment was, therefore, that the
question whether specific provisions of the EEC Treaty (or, later, secondary
Community law) had direct effect was to be decided centrally by the European
Court of Justice instead of by the various national courts according to their
(
1
) On the Dutch constitutional law background of the
Van Gend en Loos
reference, see M.
Claes,
The National Courts’ Mandate in the European Constitution
(Oxford, Hart, 2006) 74.
INTERVENTIONS ◊
INTERVENTIONS
