Developments in European information issues: Networks and relays – Services – Products, August 1998

The Court of Justice is the final arbiter in legal questions submitted to it under the EC Treaties. Cases may be brought by individuals, companies, the Commission or other EC Institution, but cases may also be referred by the national courts of Member States for a ruling. It can, under the Treaty on European Union, deal with matters relating to human rights so there may be some overlap in this area with the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights but in general the Court of Justice's competence is much wider. To alleviate the workload of the Court of Justice, the Court of First Instance was set up under the Single European Act, first sitting in 1989 to deal mainly with matters covered by the ECSC Treaty, competition, and staff disputes. Appeals may be taken to the Court of Justice.

The Court has developed a very useful web site at http://www.curia.eu.int/ which includes general information on its composition, jurisdiction, rules and publications; a diary of the Court's weekly activities; press releases; the weekly bulletin Proceedings of the Court of Justice and Court of First Instance, containing a summary of the judgments; and case reports for the last year in full text. It is worth noting that while other institutions which offer their press releases on their own web pages also make them available through the RAPID database, this is not the case with the Court so a separate search needs to be conducted here if it is thought likely to yield results. As far as the Proceedings are concerned, recent issues are also no longer made available on RAPID in English thus requiring another separate search.

The full text of important or controversial cases is usually available by 3pm local time on the day the ruling is announced, with a note to that effect on the Court site in advance of its appearance. Case reports remain available for one year but after that time they will be available only through the subscription-based CELEX database, or through one of its commercial alternatives. The option 'Case-law' on the new EUR-Lex service simply links directly to the Court's page and hence will only offer access to the latest case law.

The Court's improved search engine now allows searches by parties' name, words in title or case number, with truncation possible using the % symbol. Searches can be limited to judgments, opinions or all categories of records, while staff cases have a separate search facility. There is no difficulty in turning up joined cases by the case number. With the Mistral version of CELEX this can prove problematic if a search is done using the unique CELEX number for a case as the case is simply referred to under the number of the case with which it is joined. Then only a string search in the case title field would produce results. However, as with the Court's search engine, the case number search option in CELEX on the Web (http://europa.eu.int/celex/) also avoids this difficulty and produces successful results.

Internet address

http://www.curia.eu.int/