The law and facts of the preliminary reference procedure: a critical assessment of the EU Court of Justice’s source of knowledge

The preliminary reference procedure is today the ‘infringement procedure of the European citizen’. Although it was initially designed as a mechanism for judicial cooperation, the procedure soon became an instrument for supranational judicial review of national legislation. Such a discrepancy between the intended role of the preliminary reference procedure and its actual use in practice has important consequences that are yet to be fully explored in the literature. Indeed, how can the Court of Justice appropriately review national legislation through a procedure designed for interpreting EU law? Is the procedure governing the preliminary reference mechanism suitable to perform such a role? In this paper, we focus on one issue in particular: the way in which the Court of Justice gains information regarding the legal and factual background of the case. The Court has long recognised that appropriate knowledge of the factual and legal context of the referred case is a necessary prerequisite to performing its scrutiny and that, in accordance with the judicial cooperation model, such information is provided by the national judge. The Article critically examines the rules of procedures and the case law to show that the national judge certainly plays a key role, but other actors contribute to shaping the Court’s knowledge too. After an analysis of each actor’s role, the Article concludes that the procedure offers few guarantees as to the effective participation of individual parties to the advantage of other actors in the proceedings, increasing the risk of having partial or unbalanced information regarding the legal and factual background of the cases.