The European Court of Justice

frhe European Court of Justice—located in Luxembourg—has 13 judges, who are appointed by "common accord" of the national governments of the member countries. Political scientists Anne-Marie Burley and Walter Mattii call the Court of Justice "an unsung hero" in the process of European integration:

The thirteen judges quietly working in Luxembourg managed to trans­form the Treaty of Rome into a constitution. They thereby laid the legal foundation for an integrated European economy and polity.⁶

The judges take an oath to decide cases independently of national loyalties. They are able to follow this oath to a large extent. Two aspects of the court's decision-making process help them to do so: first, the secrecy of their delibera­tions and, second, the absence of the recording of dissenting opinions in the court. As a consequence, the judges can free themselves to a large extent from accountability to their home governments. (

A first landmark decision came in 1963 in Van Gend & Zoos v. Nederlandse Administrate der Belastingen. A private Dutch importer invoked the common market provisions of the Treaty of Rome against the Dutch government, which attempted to impose customs duties on specified imports. The court proclaimed:

the Community constitutes a new legal order... for the benefit of which the states have limited their sovereign rights, albeit within lim­ited fields, and the subjects of which comprise not only Member States but also nationals. Independently of the legislation of the Member States, Community law therefore not only imposes obligations on individuals but it also intended to confer upon them rights which become part of their legal heritage.⁷

With this ruling, the court established that individuals in the European Commu­nity have rights that they can enforce against their own national governments. The Dutch government had argued that the application of the Treaty of Rome over Dutch law was solely a question for the Dutch national courts. The Euro­pean Court of Justice ruled otherwise, so that "henceforth importers around the community who objected to paying customs duties on their imports could invoke the Treaty of Rome to force their governments to live up to their com­mitments to create a common market."⁸

A second landmark "constitutional" decision of the European Court of Justice was Costa v. ENEL, which established that where a term of the Treaty of Rome conflicts with a national statute, the treaty must prevail. In a later

392 WESTERN, CENTRAL, AND EASTERN EUROPE

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