The process of entering the European legal space requires law enforcement not only to study the written Community law but also case law. Knowledge of the specifics of the Court of Justice of the European Union (the Court, the Court of Justice) is extremely important from a practical point of view, because it is the Court has a monopoly on the interpretation of the EU law, including the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU. The main problem in this matter is the precedent nature of the decisions of this Court and the orientation in decision-making for political purposes. If domestic lawyers have more or less learned to work with precedent decisions in view of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, the political motivation of the Court in favor of the EU in the national practice of Ukraine is new.

The purpose of the article is to determine the place of the Court in the political system of the European Union and to analyze the impact of its acts on the latter. To establish the legal nature of the decisions of this Court, as well as to compare them with the acts of the European Court of Human Rights (the ECtHR), which are not new to domestic lawyers.

An important component of the EU’s political system is the Court, which is seen even as a part of mechanism of checks and balances within the Community, and even (along with its judicial function) as a legislative body. Instead, the Court of Justice has formulated the principle of the rule of the EU law (in relation to the national legal systems of the member states), which in its meaning can be equated to the founding treaties. Even more: if the latter were the result of harmonization of the wills of the member states, the Court formulated this principle alone. In the Case of Costa v. ENEL, the Court of Justice stated: “Unlike general international treaties, the EEC Treaty by virtue, has become an integral part of the legal systems of the Member States and the provisions of which must be adopted by their courts.» Although the Court of Justice’s statement on the separation ofthe Community law from international law was not based on any legal principle, it in itself separated it. The court declared it so. Thus, the Court of Justice from the outset assumed additional powers as a political body, and later a large number of concepts of the EU law became the product of its case law. At the same time, neither the treaties on formation, nor the secondary legislation or the decisions of the Court of Justice itself establish a formal rule of binding precedent.

The law of the Court of Justice of the EU is closer to the case law and serves as a source of the EU law, and given the existence of hierarchy, its practice acquires the features of precedent in the form of stare decisis (to decide as previously decided). Instead, the ECtHR judgments have the features of a precedent in the form of res judicata rule (an issue finally decided by a court cannot be re-examined by the same court or a court of parallel jurisdiction).

Bibliography

Authored books

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Edited and translated books

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Journal articles

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Theses

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27. Orlova Ju, ‘Vzaimodejstvie Suda ES s mezhdunarodnymi i nacional’nymi sudebnymi uchrezhdenijami’ (avtoref dis kand jurid nauk, 2005) (in Russian).

Conference papers

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Websites

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