COURT OF JUSTICE: EU COURT PATS ITSELF ON THE BACK FOR SURVIVING HORROR YEAR IN 1999.

The President of the Court of Justice, Gil Carlos Rodriguez Iglesias, claimed that the Court of Justice and the Court of First Instance were not only faced with far more cases than in 1998, but also had to deal with a plethora of problems: these included insufficient translators and the fact that the removal of asbestos from the two court buildings had forced both to relocate to the Kirchberg site in Luxembourg. The President did, however, point out that this huge operation had been carried out without disturbing the functioning of the institutions. The Court of Justice had prepared a "Reflection Document on the Future of the EU Legal System" which it presented to the Council of the European Union in May 1999 (see European Report No 2412): the document incorporated a series of draft amendments to procedural rule which could be adopted without changing the Treaty, and several other proposals for which the Treaty would need to be amended. The proposals are to be taken into account by the Inter-Governmental Conference on institutional reform.Court of First...