EU Committee: Court of Justice of the European Union

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Monday 17th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dykes]

My Lords, I am sure the whole House will be particularly grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Boyd, for asking for certain clarifications, bearing in mind his authority and activity as a representational corporate and commercial lawyer helping clients dealing with these matters, as well as for his general views in the sub-committee of which I am also a member. As he said, we are deeply grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, for being chairman of the committee and for having launched and taken the initiative on this report. We had an enormous amount of expert advice and guidance from our officials and special advisers, and I warmly thank them for it. That set the tone for us to do what I thought was a very thorough and profound report, which was not too long, as some of these reports are on these occasions.

I hope that when he replies the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, will reassure us on some of the points of confusion about the imminent crisis that may be looming for the ECJ. However, there is a difference of views on that. As we indicated, there is more likely to be agreement in this short debate about crisis in the General Court as a result of its excessive workload and the need for that to be taken care of. Unlike the more supreme, higher level, intellectual work of the Court of Justice, dealing with treaty matters and the support or otherwise of legislation in the European framework, the General Court is the coalface of these judicial proceedings in the European Union.

We know what kind of reception Europe gets in the British press. I hope that the situation will be a little easier now after the hacking scandal. There may be no connection at all, but you never know. There might be a bit of luck in that and most, though not all, of the British press might be more serious about reporting and carrying stories about European institutions. The wicked Commission is attacked far more often than the European Court of Justice because the European Court of Justice is harder to explain to the ordinary reader. I am not criticising the ordinary reader; it is just one of those things with highfaluting, high-level courts. However, it is essential that there should be more explanation because it is embarrassing when people get the Council of Europe mixed up with the European Union.

Despite the workload problems and the excessive time taken to deal with cases, the European Court of Justice does a very good job on behalf of the citizens of this country, who under the Maastricht treaty are also citizens of the whole of the European Union. I wish that British newspapers would sometimes remind us of that important reality. A British citizen is not just a patriotic citizen of our own country; he or she is also able to work, operate, retire and travel in the European Union as well as to use the facilities of the European judicial system mainly under the General Court of the ECJ—not so much the staff court, the European Union Civil Service Tribunal, which is a separate matter—in order to deal with things in a way which is much more just than many people in this country think because of the poison in the press. It is tragic that they should believe that.

I suppose that that happens to a lesser extent in other countries, and perhaps also on a case-by-case basis, but here there is general agreement in the printed press that Europe is a bad thing and that the European institutions, the Commission and the European Parliament are menaces. The Council of Ministers is all right because that is member Governments, but even that comes in for attack if it does not agree with what the British Government are suggesting. This nonsense really ought to stop.

The recommendations in the report are very important. The suggestion of increasing the number of judges by one-third is important. I hope that my noble and learned friend Lord Wallace of Tankerness will respond on that. I think it is very important to bear in mind that although there are no severe problems like this in the European Union Civil Service Tribunal, the sentiments about it expressed in paragraph 54 need to be looked at quite carefully. Coming back to the ECJ itself, and the need to get the workload down, and to increase the number of judges in the General Court, this needs to be done with some urgency.

As for the budget matters that we are considering, being one-quarter of 1 per cent of the total EU budget—and nowadays I think I am right in saying that most years the budget outlays are less than the original appropriations; there is always a gap between them when you take the total EU budget—there is money at the margin available for these matters; they can be easily dealt with within those parameters, and I do not think there should be an excuse. At the hearing, the Attorney-General kept harping on about financial problems and problems of government spending and that we had to be very careful—of course that is a general position that a lot of people accept—but really these are small amounts of money. The idea that a court’s functioning would be impaired and would suffer not just at the margin but quite significantly in its general activities because of a lack of funds is totally unacceptable, particularly in the international context. This is a treaty-based institution, where we have to work with our fellow member states, and I think sometimes they psychologically and in an ineffable way seem to give much more support to these institutions than we do in Britain.

I do not think that applies to the House of Lords. Tonight we have the two Lord Wallaces on the Front Bench: the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, of course dealing with other matters tonight, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness. I hope I do not misrepresent them when I say that they are both enthusiastic supporters of our membership of the European Union—I am glad to see the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, confirming that—and so we can go onwards and upwards with this excellent report and get some good responses from the Government tonight.