jueves, 23 de diciembre de 2010

El razonamiento del Tribunal de Justicia: “Las sentencias serán motivadas”.

 “The Court will . . . be called upon to adjudicate disputes which will, inevitably, subject it to public debate of a breadth and depth it is unaccustomed to. . . .its overall visibility is bound to grow and it will be judged by a media and public opinion far more informed than before.”
Weiler 1999
He leído el siguiente artículo sobre el tipo de argumentación que desarrolla el Tribunal de Justicia. El punto de partida es el art. 36 del Estatuto del Tribunal de Justicia que exige que las sentencias se motiven.  El trabajo se concentra en la recomendación de que se admitan los votos particulares pero la idea central es que para formar una opinión pública europea, las decisiones del Tribunal de Justicia han de ser examinadas críticamente por un público más amplio que el de los especialistas y las empresas afectadas. Porque, no teniendo a nadie “por encima”, el Tribunal de Justicia no se siente suficientemente presionado para dar más y mejores razones de sus decisiones en las que oculta, a menudo, bajo afirmaciones aparentemente técnicas y formales, juicios de valor de gran calado. En la entrada anterior a ésta hemos puesto un ejemplo

Perju, Vlad, Reason and Authority in the European Court of Justice. Virginia Journal of International Law, Vol. 49, No. 2, 2009.

pone otro
For instance, in Chacón Navas v. Eurest Colectividades SA,13 the  Court interpreted the Employment Equality Directive 2000/78 to implement  the medical, as opposed to the social, model of disability, though it failed even to acknowledge the latter model’s existence, much less its explicit endorsement by all the political institutions as the framework for the EU’s disability policies and programs. In a vaguely worded opinion, the Court distinguished sickness and disability as legally distinct conditions and held that discrimination based on sickness is not prohibited under Community law. It failed, however, to speak to the heart of the matter, namely why the directive is interpreted to confer lesser protections to people suffering from long-term, disabling illnesses. This judgment, like many others, does not reflect a court subscribing on prudential grounds to a minimalist judicial philosophy. Rather, it presents a court cornered by legal form and institutional selfunderstanding into deciding consequential cases by thin and unstable compromises.
… As far as EU legislative action is concerned, the issue of justification arises in a judicial context when the ECJ exercises its authority to determine the validity of acts of secondary legislation under the EC Treaty. This differs from the national context insofar as the EC Treaty—per the same Article 253—provides for a (proactive) duty to justify legislative measures.
The Court, however, has been perceptibly more lenient when scrutinizing legislative action than in reviewing administrative acts. For instance, it has held that the required level of specificity in the statement of reasons varies and depends on the type of measure under review. Thus, when the measure takes the form of a regulation, the preamble will satisfy the duty to give resons, provided that it indicates the general situation that led to the adoption of the regulation and its general objectives, without having to set out specific and complex facts
Creo que esta es una cuestión muy importante. El Tribunal de Justicia, con una justificación sistemática, parece aplicar el mismo nivel de “escrutinio” a todas las decisiones que revisa sin distinguir suficientemente entre aquellas que reflejan el diseño y ejecución de una “policy” por parte de la Comisión o del Consejo o del Parlamento Europeo y las decisiones de “enforcement” como son todas las relativas al Derecho de la Competencia (no solo la imposición de sanciones por cárteles o abuso, sino también las relativas al control de concentraciones). La judicial review de las decisiones de enforcement de la Comisión debe ser completa sin que ninguna deference hacia la agencia administrativa esté justificada porque las actuaciones de la Comisión Europea en este ámbito son injerencias en la esfera de los ciudadanos y, como tales, sometidas a todos los límites que derivan de los derechos fundamentales incluidos todos los aplicables al Derecho administrativo sancionador. Pero incluso respecto a las actuaciones legislativas de las instituciones europeas:
Leniency in reviewing legislative reasons is problematic because, in contrast to national legislators, the need for transparency is a justification for transnational legislative action in the EU.
El autor analiza en detalle la influencia del Derecho francés en la configuración del Tribunal y de su labor de escrutinio de la actuación de las instituciones europeas
With specific reference to the French legal culture, one commentator captures its features as follows: The function of the judgment is “to provide a brief explanation of the outcome, but not . . . the reasons behind that justification.” The judgment “claims authority and aims to present an outcome, but without deeper explanations. It . . . appeals to the authority of the rule, rather than the authority of the decision maker.
Higher courts have jurisdiction to control the legality of the decisions of the courts below them. Reason giving is an efficient tool for supervision
within the judicial hierarchy…. By definition, hierarchical control is not a plausible rationale for imposing a duty to give reasons on apex courts because that duty is unenforceable, at least judicially… This unenforceability of the duty to give reasons is particularly relevant in the case of the ECJ, given its position within the EU’s judicial architecture
La gran influencia del TJ en el diseño constitucional de la UE en los años setenta se debe, según algunos, a
        Court’s methods of reasoning by way of deductions from general principles, which it teleologically read into the Treaty… If the Court had been more open in both the form and content of its decisions to the value judgments that its cases constantly called for, then one might suppose that by now a European public sphere would have advanced beyond the incipient stage

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