| dc.description.abstract | Whilst it is up to the European Union’s Member States to ‘provide remedies sufficient to ensure effective legal protection in the fields covered by Union law’ (Art. 19(1) Treaty on European Union (TEU)), the determination and enforcement of the European (Union) standard of ‘effective legal protection’, encompassing judicial independence, has become the challenge for the rule of law (in the light of Art. 2 TEU), the right to a fair trial (Art. 47 Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (CFR)), for the effectiveness of Union law2 and, as a result, for the entirety of the European Union legal system. In particular, judicial independence has become a subject for many discussions: in political plenums, during the unprecedented marches gathering judges in their official gowns and ordinary citizens,3 and in courts. The phrase ‘judicial independence’ on the lips of so many would imply that globally its meaning is clear and uniform and its application straightforward.In this chapter we examine this assumption offering the account of the evolution of the understanding of the judicial independence in the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) as involving three essential elements. The underlying claim of this analysis is of no little con-sequence. Specifically, judging on the example of the Art. 19 TEU and Art. 47 CFR-rooted standard of judicial independence, it seems that, even in the contexts where the European Union misses an implied competence, the Court is capable of developing a legal construct allowing it to incorporate essential elements of the functioning of Member States under its jurisdiction in order to safeguard the unity of the European Union legal order. However, to be able to do so, the CJEU needed favourable circumstances. | en |