European Union Law ( EU Law) - A description of the reference procedure.
References requesting an interpretation of EU law A request for a decision on the interpretation of the disputed provision may be made whenever a dispute regarding the proper interpretation of a provision of EU legislation emerges during a legal dispute before a court or tribunal in one of the Member States. The case is put on hold by the national court or tribunal until the ECJ rules. Following the ECJ's ruling, the national court or tribunal continues where it left off by using the ECJ's interpretation of EU law. Because the ECJ's preliminary judgement creates a precedent that all Member State courts and tribunals must follow going forward, this is meant to produce uniformity or consistency in the interpretation of all EU law. If national courts were left in charge of interpreting EU law, they might all come up with different interpretations; instead, having one court interpret all EU law ensures that the same meaning is provided throughout the Union. Given that the EU currently has 24 official languages, this is probably the case. Every one of them contains a copy of the Treaties. There will inevitably be differences between all the different translations because translation is not an exact science; nevertheless, using the ECJ helps minimize the differences. Without the preliminary reference process, courts and tribunals in the Member States would have to interpret EU legislation on their own. As a result, there would be a very real possibility that the same articles of EU law would have different interpretations in various Member States. If that happened, the entire structure of EU law may start to fall apart. The Court has the authority to interpret clauses in both Treaties as well as "acts of the institutions, authorities, offices or agencies of the Union," which essentially refers to all secondary EU law (most notably Regulations and Directives). Additionally, it has the authority to decide how international agreements signed by such organizations should be interpreted (Hageman (Case 181/73) [1974] ECR 449]. For a "act" to be interpretable, it need not be immediately effective (Mazzalai (Case 111/75) [1976] ECR 657).
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