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El sistema jurisdiccional en el proyecto de Tratado constitucional de la Unión Europea

2003; Center for Political and Constitutional Studies; Volume: 7; Issue: 16 Linguagem: Inglês

1989-5569

José Manuel Sobrino Heredia,

Comparative constitutional jurisprudence studies

Until the Treaty of Nice of 2001, the jurisdictional system of the European Union hardly had had any changes. The Draft Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, continuing with the line initiated in Nice, goes further into these changes and introduces some new ones, with the purpose of adapting this system to the new necessities derived from the enlargement and the steps ahead of the European Union, and particularly, to face the increase of the load and the complexity of the judicial work that this implies. These new features, that prove to have a continuity sign, are included in Part I (anieles 18 and 28) and Part III (anieles III-258 to III 289) of the Draft Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe and deal with the organisation, performance and competitions of the Court of Justice. The first part of them deals with the name and number of the jurisdictional organs (the European Court of Justice, the High Court and specialised courts), the hierarchical relations among them, the selection of their members as well as to the establishment of their number, the creation of these courts, etc. These changes pursue to make the jurisdictional system of the European Union more transparent, comprehensible and effective, as we try to explain in the first Part of this study (Fragmentation of the jurisdictional structure: from an only court to a plurality of courts). The second part of these modifications are referred to the enlargement (as a result of the fusion of the treaties) and to the distribution of the responsibilities among the jurisdictional organs, to the system of appeals and actions before them as well as to the legitimised subjeets to exercise them (improvement of the access of the individuais to the Community justice, incorporation of the Committee of the Regions), to the simplification of the procedures, and to the effectiveness of the decisions of the courts themselves, this is, to the mechanisms of sanctions that are foreseen in the cases of the lack of respect for the sentences. They all deal with some aspeets that are examined in the second part of this article (the continuity in the jurisdictional responsibilities although with a redistribution of them) These changes, which deal more with the performance rather than with the philosophy of the system, will have to be contrasted with the day by day procedural reality, in order to see whether they are operative and if the administration of justice in the European Union improves with them.