European Court of Justice must accelerate case handling, ECA says

The Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice (CJEU) -- operating at a cost of €400 million to the European Union budget this year -- needs to accelerate its handling of individual cases, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) said.

The court's current case management approach is "not based on tailored time-frames" that take into account complexity, workload, resources needed and staff available, the ECA said in a statement.

"The decisions of the CJEU have important consequences for individuals, companies, member states and the Union as a whole," Kevin Cardiff, the ECA member responsible for the review, said in the statement. "Failure to adjudicate within a reasonable time may give rise to significant costs for those concerned."

The CJEU consists of two courts; the Court of Justice which deals mainly with references for preliminary rulings from national courts on the interpretation of EU law and the General Court that hears cases brought by individuals and companies against EU actions that are of direct concern to them.  

The CJEU's information-technology systems are complex and rely on an ageing central database to which a "large number" of sub-systems have been added with no integrated system to support case management, the ECA said.

"The CJEU should consider a move towards more active individual case management and performance measurement," Cardiff said. "This would provide information to support decision making so as to drive further efficiency gains and to enhance the accountability of the CJEU through more detailed reporting on performance."

Improvements have been made

The ECA said the CJEU has taken "significant organisational and procedural actions" to improve its case handling and reporting. It has introduced indicative time frames for cases, monitoring tools and reports to increase its focus on timeliness, the ECA said.

"These measures have contributed to reducing the average time taken to adopt judicial decisions in both courts," the ECA said. "The auditors found that progress had also been made, by the end of 2016, in reducing a significant backlog of cases which had built up at the General Court."

The Court of Justice is made up of 28 judges assisted by 11 advocates general. There are 45 judges at the General Court. That number is set to rise to 56 by 2019. Both will include the ECA's recommendations in ongoing studies into how their working methods can be improved, the CJEU said in a statement.

"Both courts welcome the recommendation made by the Court of Auditors regarding the publication of more detailed statistics, the putting into place of an integrated IT system and the drawing of the member states' attention to the need to need to nominate the members of the institution as soon as possible where a member's mandate comes to an end," the CJEU said.

The ECA's review was based on an analysis of various stages of procedure from a sample of 60 cases -- out of about 2800 -- that were closed in 2014 and 2015.

(Alistair Holloway, alistair.holloway@wort.lu, +352 49 93 739)