I valori dell’Unione nei giudizi nazionali: Stato di diritto e rinvio pregiudiziale

It is well known that quite a number of the cases which have called upon the Court of Justice to rule on the respect of the judges’ independence and impartiality have come to the Court through references for a preliminary ruling pursuant Article 267 TFEU. If we only refer to the cases which have been decided by the Court up until now, we are talking of more than 20 cases on which the Court ruled in an interval between 2019 and 2023. One is allowed to remark that the preliminary ruling mechanism, the “keystone” of the whole system of the judicial protection within the European Union, offered a very important contribution for the evolution of the case law in this area. It also made it possible for the Court to rule on issues which would have hardly been raised in the context of an action for infringement under Article 258 and following TFEU.. It is therefore worth asking how the so numerous and intricated preliminary questions have reached the Court, particularly who were those persons behind the reference of such questions and which course of action they took so that they could obtain a ruling by the Court of justice. First, we will show how different are the cases of preliminary references and will endeavour classifying them in distinct classes. Secondly, we will compare those different classes with the cases which have been reaching the European Court of Human rights in the same area and in the same period of time. Finally, we will try and understand whether this case law of the Court of justice is leading to a new way of making use of the mechanism of the preliminary ruling in so far as it forces the Court to be directly involved in issues which belong to a conflict of powers within a Member State.