Statistics concerning the judicial activity of the Court of Justice

1. Cases brought

As in previous years, the past year saw a significant influx of new cases, as 889 cases were entered in the register in 2025. That figure seems to represent a slight decrease compared to the previous year (2024), in which 920 cases were entered in the register, but if account is taken of the 65 requests for a preliminary ruling lodged at the Court of Justice in 2025 and transferred to the General Court, following the preliminary analysis provided for in Article 93a of the Rules of Procedure of the Court of Justice, a total of 954 cases were in fact brought before the Court of Justice in 2025, a number very close to the record achieved in 2019, when 966 cases were brought before the Court of Justice.

Closer examination of the type of cases brought before the Court of Justice in 2025 reveals, unsurprisingly, that requests for a preliminary ruling account for the lion’s share of those new cases. In addition to the 65 aforementioned cases, which were transferred to the General Court since they fell exclusively within one or more of the specific areas identified in Article 50b of the Statute, 580 new requests for a preliminary ruling were entered in the register in 2025. That is the highest number in the past five years.

As in 2024, the references for a preliminary ruling made in 2025 originate from almost all the Member States, with a significant number of requests for a preliminary ruling made by the Italian courts and tribunals (110 requests, half of which were lodged in February 2025 alone) and the Polish courts and tribunals (63 requests, the highest number since the country’s accession to the European Union in 2004).

The high number of references made by Italian courts and tribunals can be explained, to a large extent, by the questions put by those courts – in the face of a mass influx of actions brought by third-country nationals against removal measures adopted by the national authorities – concerning the interpretation of the provisions of Directive 2013/32/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 June 2013 on common procedures for granting and withdrawing international protection and, in particular, the correct interpretation of the concept of a ‘safe country of origin’. [1]

As for the references made by Polish courts and tribunals, it was primarily the field of consumer protection which held their focus, with more than half of the requests for a preliminary ruling made to the Court by Polish courts and tribunals in 2025 concerning the interpretation of the provisions of Council Directive 93/13/EEC of 5 April 1993 on unfair terms in consumer contracts [2] or of Directive 2008/48/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 April 2008 on credit agreements for consumers. [3]

While the number of requests for a preliminary ruling made by Italian and Polish courts and tribunals in 2025 was particularly high, by contrast, the number of requests originating in Germany and France remained at a very low level, with only 61 and 17 requests, respectively. Although the number of references made by French courts and tribunals is one of the lowest recorded over the past 20 years, it should however be noted, as regards the references made by German courts and tribunals, that many of them explicitly concern the specific areas in which jurisdiction to give preliminary rulings has been transferred to the General Court, in particular the common system of value added tax and compensation and assistance to passengers in the event of denied boarding or of delay or cancellation of transport services. More than 20 requests lodged at the Court of Justice and transferred to the General Court for jurisdictional reasons must therefore be added to the 61 requests which will be dealt with by the Court of Justice itself.

Aside from the references from the four aforementioned States, there was a sustained level of requests for a preliminary ruling made by Austrian and Bulgarian courts and tribunals with, respectively, 47 and 42 references made in 2025, as well as the very first reference made by a UK court since the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union and the expiry of the transition period on 31 December 2020. Based on Article 158(1) of the Agreement on the Withdrawal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from the European Union and the European Atomic Energy Community, [4] the request for a preliminary ruling was submitted on 24 October 2025 by the High Court of Justice (King’s Bench Division) and concerns the interpretation of Article 17(2) of the aforementioned agreement, relating to the rights associated with residence and the residence permits granted to dependent family members of Union citizens or United Kingdom nationals. [5]

As in previous years, appeals brought against decisions of the General Court and direct actions represented, numerically, the second and third categories of cases brought before the Court of Justice in 2025. At 245 cases, there was a slight drop in appeals, appeals concerning interim measures and appeals concerning interventions as compared with the previous year, during which the number of appeals, all categories combined, had stood at 277 cases, whereas direct actions saw a marginal increase. In addition to a few actions for annulment and one action for damages, 50 actions for failure of a Member State to fulfil its obligations were brought before the Court in 2025. They concern some 20 Member States and cover issues as diverse as the protection of the environment – in all its forms (air quality, quality of water intended for human consumption, urban waste water treatment, waste management, prevention and reduction of the harmful effects associated with exposure to noise, conversation of natural habitats, and so forth) – social policy and efforts to combat the abuse of successive fixed-term contracts, as well as transport, taxation and the free movement of capital. In March 2025, the European Commission thus brought proceedings against six separate Member States for failing to adopt or to notify the measures necessary to comply with Directive (EU) 2021/2167 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 November 2021 on credit servicers and credit purchasers and amending Directives 2008/48/EC and 2014/17/EU. [6]

Lastly, this overview of the cases brought would certainly be incomplete if mention were not made of the request for an Opinion submitted by the European Commission, on 21 November 2025, concerning the compatibility with the Treaties of the revised draft agreement providing for the accession of the European Union to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, signed in Rome on 4 November 1950. Submitted pursuant to Article 218(11) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, that request follows two earlier requests on the same issue submitted, respectively, in April 1994 and July 2013, the first of which had ended with a finding that the Community had no competence to accede to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, [7] and the second with a finding that the draft agreement on the accession of the European Union to that convention was not compatible with Article 6(2) of the Treaty on European Union or with Protocol (No 8) relating to that article. [8] The present request for an Opinion (1/25) is specifically concerned with the text resulting from the talks held further to that finding of incompatibility.

To conclude this brief overview of the cases brought, I note that a non-negligible proportion of them were accompanied by a request for the proceedings to be expedited, since an application for or proposal to apply the expedited procedure or the urgent procedure was submitted in no fewer than 88 cases, amounting to 10% of all cases brought before the Court of Justice in 2025. The urgent preliminary procedure was in fact implemented in four cases over the past year, [9] whereas two applications for the expedited procedure were granted [10] and the latter procedure was initiated by the President himself in a sensitive case concerning the interpretation of articles of Council Directive 2001/55/EC of 20 July 2001 on minimum standards for giving temporary protection in the event of a mass influx of displaced persons and on measures promoting a balance of efforts between Member States in receiving such persons and bearing the consequences thereof. [11]

2. Closed cases

While a high number of cases were lodged at the Court of Justice in 2025, the year was also marked by intensive judicial activity since it closed 774 cases, a figure approaching that achieved in previous years (792 cases closed in 2020, 772 in 2021, 808 in 2022 and 783 in 2023). It is true that that number is significantly lower than the number of cases closed in 2024 (862 cases), however that year had seen the partial renewal of the composition of the Court, meaning that a significant number of cases had to be closed before the departure of those judges whose term of office had come to an end.

Furthermore, it should be borne in mind that the College of the Court remained incomplete at the time of writing, as one judge who left the Court in February 2024 had not yet been replaced, whereas another judge, who died in office in June 2024, was replaced only one year later, in June 2025. Such factors are outside the Court’s control, but they inevitably influence the court’s productivity.

Mirroring their proportion of the number of cases brought before the Court, references for a preliminary ruling and appeals represent, unsurprisingly, the bulk of the cases closed by the Court, as it disposed of 561 preliminary ruling cases and 156 appeals in 2025, accounting for over 92% of the total cases closed last year.

As in previous years, judgments were once again the main way in which cases were closed in 2025. 447 judgments were thus delivered over the past year, whereas orders terminating the case by removal from the register, referral to the General Court or declaration that there is no need to give a decision accounted for fewer than 20% of the cases closed. The number of such orders (116) was, however, proportionally higher in the case of appeals than for references for a preliminary ruling. Whilst orders adopted on the basis of Articles 53 and/or 99 of the Rules of Procedure represented only 12% of the preliminary ruling cases closed in 2025, orders adopted either on the basis of Articles 170a and 170b or on the basis of Articles 181 or 182 of the Rules of Procedure accounted for 35% of all appeals closed last year.

Turning to the appeals closed by the Court of Justice in 2025, I note in particular the decrease in the proportion of decisions of the General Court set aside. Whilst that proportion hovered around 20% in 2022, 2023 and 2024, it in fact fell back to 15% in 2025. Of the 156 appeals closed last year, only 24 of them resulted in the judgment or order under appeal before the Court of Justice being set aside. In the majority of those cases (19), the Court of Justice referred the case back to the General Court.

As regards, more specifically, the activity of the Chamber determining whether appeals may proceed, two appeals were allowed to proceed over the course of the past year, including a first appeal falling within the new scope of Article 58a of the Statute, following the 2024 legislative reform. That case concerns an appeal brought against a decision of the General Court relating to the performance of a contract containing an arbitration clause within the meaning of Article 272 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. Lodged in December 2024, the appeal was allowed to proceed in part on 29 April 2025 and is currently pending before the Court. [12]

Examination of the data on the manner in which cases are closed reveals that the number and the percentage of cases determined with an Opinion fell over the past year. In 2025, 239 closed cases benefited from the illumination provided by the Opinion of an Advocate General – accounting for 31% of the total number of cases closed in 2025 – whereas the number of closed cases determined with an Opinion came to 336 in 2024 and 283 in 2023, 39% and 36% respectively of the total number of cases closed in those years. That decrease could be explained, in part, by the transfer of jurisdiction to give a preliminary ruling to the General Court, which is now called upon to have recourse to the Opinion of an Advocate General in order to rule on the cases transferred to it by the Court of Justice, but is primarily the result of the lack of genuinely new points of law in the other areas, which led the Court to make greater use of the possibility, laid down in the fifth paragraph of Article 20 of the Statute, of determining cases without an Opinion of an Advocate General. As is apparent from the tables below, in 2025 only the fields of energy and the free movement of persons saw a real increase in the number of cases determined with an Opinion as compared with the previous year.

As for the breakdown of closed cases by formation of the Court, three-judge Chambers gave the most decisions, closing no fewer than 352 cases in 2025. Five-judge Chambers closed 255 cases over the course of the same year, whereas 35 cases were closed by the Grand Chamber of the Court. That is a quite marked decrease on the previous year, during which 75 cases were disposed of by the Grand Chamber. As previously noted, that difference can be explained by the high number of decisions given prior to the partial renewal of the composition of the Court of Justice, in October 2024, which included inter alia a judgment ruling on fifteen actions related to EU legislation in the field of transport.

As regards, lastly, the average length of proceedings, it stood at 16.7 months, all types of case combined, compared with 17.7 months in 2024. The reduction in the length of proceedings covers all types of case, because it fell from 17.2 months to 16.9 months for preliminary ruling cases, from 21.5 months to 20 months for direct actions and from 18.4 months to 15.1 months for appeals.

3. Pending cases

As a logical consequence of the imbalance between the number of cases brought over the past year and the number of cases closed, the number of pending cases as at 31 December 2025 was higher than the previous year: 1 322 cases compared with 1 207 cases one year earlier. Preliminary ruling cases and appeals still account for the lion’s share of the litigation brought before the Court of Justice, at 772 cases and 443 cases, respectively.

[1] OJ 2013 L 180, p. 60.

[2] OJ 1993 L 95, p. 29.

[3] OJ 2008 L 133, p. 66.

[4] OJ 2020 L 29, p. 7.

[5] Case C‑682/25, Crossryn.

[6] OJ 2021 L 438, p. 1. Those actions, registered under numbers C‑207/25, C‑208/25, C‑210/25, C‑212/25, C‑213/25 and C‑215/25, are directed against Finland, Bulgaria, Spain, Hungary, the Netherlands and Portugal, respectively.

[7] Opinion 2/94 (Accession of the Community to the ECHR) of 28 March 1996 (EU:C:1996:140).

[8] Opinion 2/13 (Accession of the European Union to the ECHR) of 18 December 2014 (EU:C:2014:2454).

[9] The cases in question are Cases C‑135/25 PPU, Kachev (which gave rise to the judgment of 20 May 2025, EU:C:2025:366), C‑219/25 PPU, Kamekris (which gave rise to the judgment of 19 June 2025, EU:C:2025:456), C‑313/25 PPU, Adrar (which gave rise to the judgment of 4 September 2025, EU:C:2025:647), and C‑712/25 PPU, Rastochev (which gave rise to the judgment of 12 February 2026, EU:C:2026:101).

[10] See Case C‑280/25, Lin II, and Case C‑440/25, Ebilum.

[11] Case C‑195/25, Framholm (which gave rise to the judgment of 20 November 2025, EU:C:2025:904).

[12] Case C‑881/24 P, SC v Eulex Kosovo (order of 29 April 2025, EU:C:2025:313).