Monitoring References to the Court of Justice of the European Union
Preliminary references are EU law's early-warning system: every reference is a dispute a national judge could not resolve alone. EU Law Radar reports them as they are lodged — the questions quoted verbatim — and follows each case through to judgment.
Greek law obliges every employer to pay Christmas, Easter and holiday bonuses worth two months' salary — except employers in the public sector, which stopped paying them in the crisis years. Hospital staff in Kilkis, most of whom now earn less per year than the statutory minimum wage, ask whether the Adequate Minimum Wages Directive allows that.
Latvia's air navigation provider, a state-owned company, requires its air traffic controllers to hold security clearance for classified information — which in practice excludes nationals of other Member States. A licensed EU controller challenged the exclusion. Latvia's Supreme Court asks whether the post falls within the public service exception, and whether airspace security in a 'complex geopolitical context' can justify it.
Italian law refuses to execute a European arrest warrant if the requested person's mental state makes them permanently unable to take part in proceedings with full awareness. That ground appears nowhere in the Framework Decision. The Milan Court of Appeal asks whether recital 12 and Article 1(3) allow it anyway.
Fourteen Skåne municipalities award contracts directly to a jointly owned company, relying on the in-house exception. That exception requires more than 80% of the company's activities to serve the owners. Sweden's competition authority says the company's sales to third parties on a competitive market should not count towards the 80%. The Supreme Administrative Court asks the Court.
France taxes large companies that buy back and cancel their own shares, on the amount of the capital reduction and a proportionate share of the premiums. Carrefour and Teleperformance say that is an indirect tax on the raising of capital, which Directive 2008/7 forbids outright. The Conseil d'État asks whether a tax on giving capital back can be a tax on bringing it in.
Greece notifies asylum refusals by ordinary email and treats them as served 48 hours after sending, with the appeal deadline running from that moment. There is no record of when the email was received or opened. A Thessaloniki court asks whether that presumption is compatible with the right to an effective remedy — and what happens when the email went to spam.
The European Public Prosecutor's Office, investigating a recruitment at the European Court of Auditors, asked it to release twelve officials from their duty of confidentiality so they could be heard as witnesses. The Court of Auditors refused. The General Court annulled the refusal in June; the Court of Auditors now appeals, asking how much a Union institution must be told before it lets the Union's own prosecutor question its staff.
Belgium's French Community makes streaming services that target its audience invest in audiovisual production, and it decides what counts: new works, with a quota for Belgian French-language ones, and no credit for buying rights to films already made. Netflix — established in the Netherlands, already paying there — asks the Constitutional Court, and now the Court of Justice, how much of that the Audiovisual Media Services Directive allows.
Italy's communications regulator decided that Amazon's logistics, locker and transport-organising arms are postal service providers needing authorisation under the Postal Services Directive. Three Amazon companies say they never clear, sort, transport or deliver anything. The Advocate General has proposed that organising and controlling those who do is enough.
A judge in Erfurt hearing a GDPR claim against Meta alone wants to refer questions to Luxembourg. German procedure says a single judge who meets a question of principle must hand the case to the three-judge chamber — which may then decline to refer. The judge asks whether Article 267 tolerates a rule that lets a court's own colleagues stand between it and the Court.
The questions referred are quoted word-for-word from the official texts. Commentary is clearly separated from the record.
Each report links the authentic documents on CURIA and EUR-Lex by ECLI and CELEX number.
URLs cited in academic literature since 2012 do not change. Corrections are logged, never silently overwritten.