Information sources of the European Court of Justice, February 2006

In order to manage its translation burden better, the European Court of Justice decided in March 2004 that its case law would no longer be published in full, but would be published selectively instead. Judgements relating to preliminary rulings by national courts continue to be published in full as before, but for direct action cases judgements will no longer be published in the European Court Reports where they are given by a Chamber of three or five judges without a submission from an Advocate General. Summary information in all the official languages will however be included in the European Court Reports for all unpublished judgements. In practice these judgements are usually straightforward, containing no new points of law and are often uncontested infringement proceedings. The changes are based on modifications to the Court�s rules of procedure introduced by the Treaty of Nice which mean that Advocate General opinions are now only necessary where the case involves new points of law.

This new policy will speed up the translation process. Decisions not translated into all languages, and hence not published in full in the European Court Reports, will still be available to the public in either duplicated or electronic format in the language of the case and the language of the judges. The electronic version will be available through the Curia website at {http://www.curia.eu.int}. The Court also intends to ask the Publications Office to load the unpublished decisions on to EUR-Lex in all available languages in order to ensure the widest possible access for legal and academic research purposes.

Judgements and opinions, once delivered in the Courtroom, are generally uploaded on to the website by mid-afternoon, though earlier information may be gleaned from press releases issued for important cases. Clicking on the Submit button on the search form without specifying any search criteria will bring up the latest documents added to the Curia database. A brief version of the judgement is published in the Official Journal of the EU and is therefore later available in pdf format from the EUR-Lex site. However the Court�s own database now not only includes judgements and opinions from June 1997 to date but also, from 2005, contains all orders and notifications published in the Official Journal as well as the OJ version of judgments. Inclusion of these texts has subsequently been backdated to 2003 and gives the OJ reference. The texts are loaded when they are sent on to the Publications Office and are therefore available on the Court�s site before being officially published by the Publications Office, but once the pdf version is available a link is established from the Court�s site to the published text. Notification of receipt of a case might appear on the website for example six to eight weeks after its arrival at the Court, while public orders are normally loaded about ten days after the parties have been notified.

An excellent tool for tracking cases is the Court Diary at {http://www.curia.eu.int/en/actu/activites/index.htm} which now provides details of upcoming judgements, opinions and hearings for the following four weeks (though the last three are only provisional). This listing now contains a link using the case number to all available documents for that case.

More important structural changes have recently been made to the Curia website to accommodate the new Civil Service Tribunal which was established under Council Decision 2004/752/EC of 2 November 2004 to deal with staff cases handled until now by the Court of First Instance (CFI). The Tribunal was set up to relieve pressure on the court system and is a judicial panel attached to the CFI. Appeals against Tribunal decisions may be taken to the CFI. At the time of writing the Tribunal�s rules of procedure are still being drawn up. However provision for internet access to information about its workings and decisions has already been made on the Curia website, although as yet very limited substantive information is given. The prefix used to identify case numbers is the letter F in contrast to C for cases before the Court of Justice and T for cases before the Court of First Instance. Otherwise the same number and year format is used for the case references. A simple list of cases pending can be seen but no further documentation is available. For more information see the website at {http://www.curia.eu.int/en/instit/presentationfr/index_tfp.htm} and {http://www.curia.eu.int/en/content/juris/index.htm}.