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.
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.
In its Facebook investigations the Commission demanded every document held by named executives that matched broad search terms, over years, whatever it contained. The General Court found that 'necessary'. Meta's two appeals ask whether necessity is tested term by term or in the round, and what protects the personal information swept up. The Advocate General has proposed dismissing both.
Investigating the Vivendi/Lagardère merger, the Commission ordered Lagardère to collect its employees' personal phones and messages and hand over what matched. The General Court upheld the order in June. The appeal raises the protection of journalistic sources, private life, and the question of who may be made to conduct the search.
In April the Court held that a lender may not charge interest on the fees it has financed. A Warsaw court now asks what that means in practice: which of the Consumer Credit Directive's information duties such a contract breaches, whether the national sanction must follow, and whether a court must raise the point of its own motion.
Brussels taxes parking spaces, but exempts buildings used for a public service of general interest owned by Belgium's own regions and communities. Baden-Württemberg, which owns such a building in the city, is taxed. Its appeal asks whether the prohibition of discrimination on grounds of nationality protects the subdivisions of another Member State.
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.