How To Make Courts Refer Cases Even If They Don’t Want To

How do you translate “Europäischer Verfassungsgerichtsverbund“? This humungous term is a creation of Andreas Voßkuhle, the president of the FCC. It denotes the joint effort of the FCC, the ECJ and the ECHR to cooperate and respect each other’s contribution to European right protection.

Today’s decision by the FCC (First Senate) seems to be a paragon of what this “Verfassungsgerichtsverbund” means in practice:

A financial court had doubts about the constitutionality of a law about government aids. It called upon the FCC to decide about that issue according to Art. 100 I GG. The thing was, the contested part of the law was a direct transposition of a EU directive, without any margin of appreciation for the national legislators. In that case the FCC has, according to Solange II, no jurisdiction: It is for the ECJ to decide if that law infringes fundamental rights or not.

That is all well known, so far. The new part about today’s decision is this: Whether or not the directive leaves a margin of appreciation in its transposition has to be absolutely clear before a court can refer a case to the FCC. If it isn’t sure it has to call upon the ECJ first. They have to do that, even lower-level courts – not due to European law, but due to German constitutional law. And they will get their ears twisted by the FCC if they fail to comply.

Senate scuffle

Speaking of the duty to refer to the ECJ: Wasn’t there a quarrel between the two senates about that issue?

The FCC traditionally gave courts lots of leeway in handling that duty. In the Honeywell decision the Second Senate wholeheartedly confirmed that point of view and emphasized that the FCC should not function as a “supreme referral control court”. Only if the courts screw up completely in interpreting EU law, their refusal to refer the case to the ECJ will be unconstitutional and the FCC has to get involved.

Before, the First Senate had tried a slightly more comprehensive approach in a chamber decision: A refusal to refer violates the court’s constitutional duties also if it shrugs off the ECJ’s requirements, regardless how it handles material EU law issues. With Honeywell the Second Senate tried to knip that advance in the bud.

Just a few months ago, the First Senate made a decision that might be read as an attempt at reconciliation: Nominally, it confirmed its advance from the chamber decision, but it brushed over the face-off with the other senate by claiming that both positions amount to the same thing, practically.

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Themen: Ecj , Bverfg , Fcc , Honeywell , Fundamental Rights , Echr

Erschienen 26. Oktober 2011 auf http://verfassungsblog.de.

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Das Bundesverfassungsgericht
DFR - BVerfGE 118, 79 - Treibhausgas-Emissionsberechtigungen

Das Fallrecht (DFR) -- Gerichtsentscheidungen im juristischen Studium


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Der europäische Verfassungsgerichtsverbund

Downloadable! Das Bundesverfassungsgericht (BVerfG), der Europäische Gerichtshof für Menschenrechte (EGMR) und der Gerichtshof der Europäischen Gemeinschaften (EuGH) sind mit unterschiedlichen, funktional aber vergleichbaren Aufgaben im europäischen Mehrebenensystem betraut. Sie wirken insofern auch nicht gegeneinander, sondern im Rahmen eines europäischen Verfassungsgerichtsverbundes. Mit diesem Begriff umschreibt der Beitrag die vielfältigen Techniken des Zusammenspiels der genannten Gerichte und vermeidet damit starre Festlegungen wie Gleichordnung oder Überordnung und Unterordnung. Die rechtlichen Grundlagen für eine so verstandene Kooperation finden sich in den Prinzipien der Völkerrechtsfreundlichkeit und auch in der Europarechtsfreundlichkeit des Grundgesetzes, - die im Lissabon-Urteil des Bundesverfassungsgericht betont herausgearbeitet wird. Zum anderen wird das europäische Recht durch die Rezeption nationaler Rechtsprinzipien geprägt, wobei aus deutscher Sicht vor allem der Grundrechtsschutz zu nennen ist. So hat sich die Individualbeschwerde zum EGMR inzwischen zu einem die Verfassungsbeschwerde ergänzenden Rechtsschutz entwickelt. Bedeutsam ist ferner, dass der Vertrag von Lissabon die Wahrung der nationalen Identität der Mitgliedstaaten ausdrücklich zu einem Verfassungsprinzip der EU erklärt hat. Vor diesem Hintergrund erweist sich auch das im Lissabon-Urteil des Bundesverfassungsgerichts neu eingeführte Maßstab der Identitätskontrolle, mit dem die äußersten Grenzen der europäischen Integration überwacht werden sollen, als eine Ausprägung des Verbundes zwischen BVerfG und EuGH. -- The German Federal Constitutional Court, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and the Court of Justice of the European Communities (ECJ) are vested with different, albeit functionally comparable, tasks in the European multilevel system. They do not operate opposing each other but in a framework of multilevel cooperation of the constitutional courts, the Europäische Verfassungsgerichtsverbund. This term is used here to describe the numerous techniques of cooperation between the three courts, avoiding rigorous conceptions such as “equal footing” or “supremacy” to denote the relationship between the courts. The legal foundations for such cooperation can be found in two German constitutional law principles: openness to international law (Grundsatz der Völkerrechtsfreundlichkeit) and openness to European law (Grundsatz der Europarechtsfreundlichkeit), the latter principle developed distinctly in the Lisbon judgement of the Federal Constitutional Court. The cooperative foundations can also be noticed from the impact of national legal principles on European law, in particular concerning the protection of individual rights. For example, the individual complaint to the ECHR serves as a supplementary layer of the protection of human rights in addition to the national constitutional complaint to the Federal Constitutional Court. Furthermore, the Treaty of Lisbon explicitly recognises that the national identity of the Member States is to be protected—this already is a constitutional principle of the European Union. With this as background, it may well be argued that the constitutional yardstick of “identity control”—which the Federal Constitutional Court introduced in its Lisbon Treaty judgement to identify the ultimate limits of European integration—is also an integral element of the multilevel cooperation system that obtains between the Federal Constitutional Court and the ECJ.


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