24/07/2026
On 15 July 2026, the European Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs Committee (AFCO) held a public hearing on a draft report that, on its surface, reads as technical housekeeping: how the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) allocates cases, assigns judges, and organises its work. Drafted by ECR rapporteur Charlie Weimers with backing from the EPP, the report calls for “a more transparent and objective Court of Justice.”
Few would object to that framing in the abstract – and, as Professor Alberto Alemanno has argued, the Court has largely brought this unprecedented level of political scrutiny on itself. Despite the transparency obligations that apply to every EU institution, the CJEU has long resisted opening up its own governance: how cases are assigned, how judges are designated, why Advocates General’s opinions are sometimes dispensed with and the lack of streaming of its hearings (you need to travel to Luxembourg to attend a hearing and learn about the arguments of the parties). That silence created the opening this report now exploits.
A hearing that agreed on the diagnosis, not the cure
The hearing itself made that tension visible. Some in the room defended the Court’s authority to guarantee the uniform, supreme application of EU law as close to non-negotiable, open to more transparency only insofar as it doesn’t dent the Court’s effectiveness. Others took a middle path: broadly supportive of the Court’s role, but insistent that its powers stay strictly within Treaty limits, paired with calls for clearer interpretative methods and closer dialogue with national judges. A third strand went further still, casting the Court’s evolving case law as an encroachment on Member States’ constitutional autonomy that needs to be pulled back. What’s striking is that this range of views coexisted with something close to consensus: however sharply people disagreed about the report itself, almost no one in the room argued that the Court’s role in the EU legal order isn’t fundamental – a point underlined by the committee’s own chair, who opened proceedings by noting that no institution, however central, should be placed beyond scrutiny. The contribution that came closest to threading that needle was from Eleanor Sharpston, a former CJEU advocate general, who argued that the Court, like any public institution, should be open to scrutiny and continuous improvement – while stressing that this openness cannot come at the cost of its position as a cornerstone of the EU legal order. It’s a useful reminder of what’s actually being contested: not whether the Court should be accountable, which barely anyone disputes, but to whom and through what mechanism – which is where the report does its real work.
The real target isn’t procedure – it’s Article 19 TEU
Beneath the report’s technical vocabulary sits something more consequential: the Court’s power, built on Article 19 TEU, to declare that a national body captured by political power, such as Poland’s post-2015 Constitutional Tribunal, is no longer a court capable of applying EU law. That power is precisely what allowed the CJEU’s Grand Chamber to rule, in December 2025, that Poland’s Tribunal no longer met the standard of judicial independence.
The report’s proposed “reciprocal dialogue mechanism” would require the Court to invite a national court to submit observations before ruling on that court’s own independence – comparable to asking the side accused of fixing a match to brief the referee beforehand. Had such a mechanism existed earlier, some of the EU’s most significant rule-of-law interventions against Poland and Hungary might never have happened.
The hearing’s own guest list raises questions. Among the invited experts were a former German Constitutional Court judge known for a notably CJEU-sceptic ruling, and Sharpston herself – who had separately and unsuccessfully sued the Court over her own removal, a plain conflict of interest. Absent from the panel: any clear voice from the Polish or Hungarian judiciary or civil society, and no one tasked with defending the Article 19 case law under direct attack.
Even as a non-binding resolution, the report would still shape how the Court’s Statute is revised next – normalising the idea that enforcing Article 19 TEU against a captured judiciary is “overreach” rather than the Court doing its constitutional job. Three consequences follow. A weakened Article 19 doctrine means less protection the next time a government moves against its own judges. A “reciprocal dialogue mechanism” hands the very courts whose independence is in dispute a say before any ruling against them – producing, as Alemanno puts it, “a chilling effect at best, a de facto veto at worst.” And it puts in question the guarantee ordinary citizens rely on: an independent Court of Justice as the court of last resort when national courts fail to protect their EU-conferred rights.
None of this lets the Court off the hook. The fix isn’t to shield it from scrutiny, but to make its governance transparent enough that its independence stops being an easy target – published case-allocation rules, streamed hearings, real administrative accountability – while defending Article 19 TEU as the legal foundation that keeps EU rights enforceable before independent courts. The alternative is to let “captured courts decide, unsupervised, whether EU law still applies to them.”
AFCO and JURI members committed to an independent judiciary have until the November committee vote to table a substitute resolution rather than merely amend the Weimers text. Civil society and legal academia don’t need to wait for that vote to make their position known.