Activity of the registry of the court of justice in 2018

• Author: Court of Justice of the European Union
• Pages: 116-119

Annual Repor t 2018 | Judicial Act ivity

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ACTIVITY OF THE REGISTRY OF THE COURT

OF JUSTICE IN 2018

By Mr Marc-André Gaudissart , Deputy Registrar

While the task s entrusted to it are man y and varied, in parti cular because of its spe cial place in the struc ture

of a multilingual judicial institution such as the Court of Justice of the European Union and the interface it

provides bet ween the courts of t he Member States and the rep resentatives of the p arties, on the one han d,

and the Members’ cabinets and the institution’s departments, on the other hand, the primary task of the

Registry of the Court of Justice is, of course, to ensure, rst and foremost, that the proceedings are properly

conducted and t hat the cases brought bef ore the Court of Justice are r igorously maintained, fro m the entry

of the document instituting the proceedings in the Registry’s register to the ser vice on the parties or the

court which re ferred it of the decision bring ing the proceedings to an end.

The number of cas es brought and closed by t he Court of Justice th erefore has a direct impa ct on the Registr y’s

workload and its ability to meet the many challenges it faces, both in terms of optimal case management

and computeris ation of procedures in a conte xt marked by increased a ttention to the prote ction of personal

data and in terms of the broader, ongoing discussions on the changes that should be made to the texts

governing the judic ial architecture of the Eu ropean Union with a view to en suring, in the interes ts of litigants,

an optimal divi sion of jurisdiction bet ween the Court of Justice an d the General Court.

As the past year has once again been marked by a very steady pace, both in terms of cases brought and

cases closed , the following lines will main ly be devoted to judicial act ivity, and not to the othe r tasks carried

out by the Registry, even if they have mobilised a signicant propor tion of its res ources.

Cases lodged

In 2018, 849 cases we re lodged before the Cour t of Justice

.

This is a new record in t he institution’ s history,

the previous re cord having been reached just one y ear earlier, with no fewer than 739 cases i ntroduced in

2017. This very signicant increase (of the ord er of 15%) in the numb er of cases brought during a year can

be explained, rst , by the continuous increase in the number of requests for a preliminary ruling submitte d

to the Court — wi th 568 new cases, thes e requests represented in fa ct, in 2018, some 100 more cases than

in 2016 (470 cases) and almost twi ce as many as 10 years earlier (288 new preliminary ruling s in 2008)  but

also by a signic ant increase in the number of dire ct actions and appeals.

n 2018, 6 actions for annulment and 57 actions for failure to full obligations (all categories combined) were

brought before the Court, while the total number of new appeals, appeals against interim measures or

appeals on intervention amounted to 199 in 2018 (compared with 147 in 2017). This signicant increase is

partly due to the increase in the number of cases brought before the General Court in previous years

(2016 and 2017 in par ticular), but also to the increase in the n umber of cases close d by the General Cour t,

largely due to the in crease in the number of its jud ges following the reform of the Euro pean Union’s judicial

architecture.

If we look for a momen t at the origin of the request s for a preliminary ruling — which n ow represent more

than 70% of all case s pending before the Cour t of Justice — it is apparent t hat, with one exception , courts of

all the Member St ates have applied to the Cour t of Justice over the past ye ar, which tes ties to the vitalit y of

the pre liminary ruli ng procedure and the co ndence that national cour ts place in the Co urt of Justice to

answer questions they may have about the interpretation or validity of EU law. As can be seen from the

following tab les, Germany and Ital y still top the ‘geograph ical’ ranking of reque sts for a preliminar y ruling —

with 78 and 68 req uests for a preliminar y ruling made in the past year respe ctively — but the cour ts of the

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