Authors

Raluca Bercea¹;  ¹ Faculty of Law, West University of Timișoara, Romania

Discussion

Faced with the rule of law crisis generated by the 2017-2019 national legislative reforms, the Romanian judicial associations, organized as NGOs, have fulfilled their declared purpose of safeguarding judicial independence by strategically using the mechanism of Article 267 TFEU. Taking advantage of the CJEU’s increased willingness to engage with questions concerning the rule of law and the organization of the national judicial systems, the Romanian associations have thus provoked answers on the most politically-charged questions concerning the judiciary. Within the matrix of the formal channel provided by Article 267 TFEU - under which references may be submitted by any court or tribunal - the Romanian rule of law referrals have, recurrently and significantly, activated only parts of the national judicial network, with the exclusion of others, despite their equal justification, competence, and interest in the referred questions. A tacit informal agreement appears to have been reached by a small number of pro-European national courts that chose to rely on the referrals to the CJEU to slow the rule of law decay at the national level. These strategies occasionally pushed at the limits of the formal procedural rule and restruck the balance of power in the judicial field at the national level.