(AGENPARL) – BRUXELLES lun 15 maggio 2023 The Van Gend & Loos and Costa v ENEL cases, decided on 5 February 1963 and 15 July 1964, respectively, are commonly considered the two building blocks of EU law as an autonomous legal order with direct effect before national courts and primacy over national law. However, there is a third important case, decided between the other two, without which neither direct effect nor primacy of EU law would be considered binding doctrines. On 27 March 1963, on a preliminary reference from the Dutch customs tribunal, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) handed down its judgment in the case of Da Costa en Schaake. The Dutch tribunal asked, as it had previously in Van Gend & Loos, whether the standstill clause in Article 12 of the Treaty of Rome had direct effect. This circumstance raised the question of the binding authority of ECJ judgments outside the framework of the case in which they were pronounced. The view of the civil law tradition was that a judgment is binding only between the parties of the original case, meaning that the Court would have to answer the same question again. By contrast, the Commission asked the Court to dismiss the questions, given that they had already been answered. In its ruling in Da Costa en Schaake, the Court considered that its ruling in Van Gend & Loos was sufficient to answer the question posed by the Dutch tribunal, but did not dismiss the reference. In its answer to the tribunal, the Court did not repeat its previous answer, but indicated that the question had already been answered and that there was therefore no need to answer it again. In this way, the ECJ laid down the foundations for the general authority of its case law: not only is the legal interpretation provided in a judgment binding in the case at hand, it also provides an authoritative interpretation of EU law generally. This doctrine, which is not exactly the same as common law precedent, has been further developed in later ECJ case law.

Fonte : © Unione europea, 2023 – PE

Fonte/Source: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/it/document/EPRS_BRI(2023)747893