The European Court of Justice and Process-Oriented Review

Summary:

This article analyses how recent case-law reveals that the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has striven to develop guiding principles which aim to improve the way in which the political institutions of the EU adopt their decisions.

In those cases, the ECJ decided not to second-guess the appropriateness of the policy choices made by the EU legislator. Instead, it preferred to examine whether, in reaching an outcome, the EU political institutions had followed the procedural steps mandated by the authors of the Treaties. The article argues that judicial deference in relation to ‘substantive outcomes’ has been counterbalanced by a strict ‘process review’. The article discusses three rulings of the ECJ where an EU policy measure was challenged indirectly.