The European Court of Justice after Amsterdam

Abstract

The European Union, embracing also the Communities, is more than an intergovernmental organisation. The Communities have a legal status of their own as well as their own extensive powers, and in itself the system is different from all previous national and international systems. A notion which is essentially inherent in this Union, as in any democratic system of government, is that of the rule of law - meaning that everybody is subject to the law, which reigns supreme and must be respected as such. The founding fathers of the European Community laid as its foundations a system of law, uniform and autonomous in its own right. It is a body of law separate from and transcending national law, binding in its entirety and often directly applicable in all member states. There have been several developments in the evolution of this Union. The merger of the institutions of the three Communities brought the reality of European integration even closer to the citizen in 1967, thus establishing a single Council and a singe Commission. The European Court of Justice however, ·as well as the· European Parliament, were already common to the three Communities since 1958. In this paper we shall be taking a close look at the role that this Court has played since Maastricht, the developments proposed recently in its regard, and those actually written into the Amsterdam Draft Treaty. [excerpt]