The survival of the fitted? : individual protection in the European Court of Justice's preliminary ruling procedure

Abstract

The preliminary ruling procedure (PRP) of the European court of justice ensures the uniformity of EU law through the cooperation with national courts. However, the mechanism is simultaneously ‘the infringement procedure of the EU citizen’: it opens the gates of the court for individuals to bring their claims to the court, and it does so successfully. Yet, there is something more to a procedure so strongly linked to the need to ensure the uniformity of a legal system always afraid of fragmenting and crumbling. Individuals are there, but the procedure is not fully about them. One feels a tension in a procedure that aims towards the concrete and the abstract at the same time. This thesis argues that the procedure is best understood if we consider that two different disputes coexist within it. This entails a new way of approaching the PRP: rather than looking at the dialogue between courts, the key here is the transformation of the dispute, from the main dispute to the Europeanized one, that takes place in the proceedings. Moreover, the thesis proposes a novel framework of analysis with which to explore the procedure. It unpacks the procedure to unveil its different procedural factors and analyze how they contribute to the transformation of the dispute. The thesis provides a sober picture of the individuals in the proceedings. It first demonstrates empirically that the court maintains both narratives, rights protection and uniformity, for most rulings. This sometimes comes at the cost of transforming the individual in the proceedings. Far from irrelevant, this confirms that the procedure is a tool for the protection of individual rights; but it places such findings in a more nuanced context, which considers what exactly this implies and what consequences it has for the individual in the proceedings and for the uniformity goal of the PRP.