Filippo Fontanelli

The Hidden Dialogue: When Judicial Competitors Collaborate

Legal scholars have regularly focused on the conflict episodes between the Court of Justice and national constitutional courts. We try instead to investigate the techniques that both the Court of Justice and its national counterparts use to develop a hidden judicial dialogue, through which a non-legally bound harmonization is pursued, and mostly achieved. Moreover, we understand these strategies in the light of the notion of comity, and we compare the opposite attitudes kept by the Court of Justice towards national courts and international tribunals to describe its shifting attitude, which is due to its interest in preserving a pre-eminent position in the interpretive competition over EC law.

ISO AND CODEX STANDARDS AND INTERNATIONAL TRADE LAW: WHAT GETS SAID IS NOT WHAT'S HEARD

This article challenges the rhetoric of hardening, according to which international standards become binding through WTO endorsement. The analysis of the system of presumptions set up in the Technical Barriers to Trade Agreement and Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary Agreement reveals that international standards are actually used as a ‘ceiling’ rather than a ‘floor’ benchmark of protection, contrary to their original spirit. They represent a codified and agreed yardstick for least trade-restrictive measures, a minimum compromise between the regulatory regime and the trade litigation machinery. It follows that their nature—at least within the WTO system—is irreversibly distorted; they are treated as facts rather than as safety or quality devices.

The Harmonization Potential of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union

This article discusses two underrated and connected aspects that determine the applicability of the EU Charter on Fundamental Rights to Member State measures. First, the Charter can be a decisive standard of review for domestic measures only when they are covered by EU law but are not precluded by it. In this respect, the distinction between non-preclusion and nonapplication of EU law has been overlooked by legal scholarship. Second, because the scope of application of EU law and that of the Charter are identical, the latter suffers from the same uncertainties as the former. This article concludes that the entry into force of the Charter has exposed the blurred contours of the application of EU law, in particular in the area of the market freedoms. As a result, a certain spontaneous harmonisation of human rights protection has emerged.

The Charter of Fundamental Rights and the Reach of Free Movement Law

This chapter discusses two underrated and connected aspects that determine the applicability of the Charter in the area of the market freedoms. First, the Charter can be a decisive standard of review for domestic measures only when they are covered by EU law but are not precluded by it. In this respect, the distinction between non-preclusion and non-application of EU law is overlooked in the case law and in the scholarship. Second, because the applications of EU law and the Charter are aligned, the latter suffers from the uncertainties of the former. This chapter concludes that the entry into force of the Charter has exposed the blurred contours of the application of EU law, in particular in the area of the market freedoms.

Criminal Proceedings Against Albers

In August 2012, the First Criminal Division of the Court of Cassation (Supreme Court or Court), the highest Italian domestic court, issued a judgment upholding Germany’s sovereign immunity from civil claims brought by Italian war crime victims against Paul Albers and eight others in the Italian courts (Albers). In so doing, the Court overruled its own earlier decisions and also reversed the judgment of April 20, 2011, by the Italian Military Court of Appeal (Military Court), which had upheld such claims relating to war crimes committed by German forces in Italy during World War II. With this ruling, the Court of Cassation put an end to its decade long effort to find an exception to the well-known rule of customary international law providing for sovereign immunity from foreign civil jurisdiction for acts jure imperii. This revirement resulted from the Court’s decision to give effect to the judgment of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in Germany v. Italy.