EU Committee: Court of Justice of the European Union

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Monday 17th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle]

My Lords, I join my noble friend Lord Anderson of Swansea in congratulating the committee and its chair on the excellent report before us tonight. It once again shows the value of our European Union Select Committee and the work that it does. The subject of the Court of Justice is—and I come on to this in a moment or two—a subject that arouses great passions in some quarters, but this is a model of a balanced report based on careful study of evidence and entirely non-partisan in its spirit, and I think, as the Opposition do, that the Government would do well to heed its recommendations.

My only regret—and it is a point that I have made about these reports before—is that it was completed at the end of March and we are now debating it in the second half of October. In this case, it so happens that the report and its recommendations remain relevant, topical and timely, but that is not always the case, and we should give these Select Committee reports a high priority in our work.

Obviously there is a real problem about the Court’s growing case load. I looked up how many cases the ECJ had before it or had settled in the year before we joined the European Community in 1970, and the number was 70. In 2010, the figure was 574, which tells you something about the expanded scope of the European Union’s work. I agree with my noble friend Lord Rowlands that some of this is the result of unintended consequences, but at the same time one also has to acknowledge the technical complexity of operating a single market as seen in the REACH chemicals directive or the extension of the scope of European activity into areas such as criminal justice, because our security depends on our interdependence with our neighbours. This will inevitably bring more work into the remit of the Court.

In one respect, the letter that we have received from the Minister for Europe, the right honourable David Lidington, is encouraging. It acknowledges that there is a workload problem, and it is encouraging that the Government are having discussions about this. However, the sentence,

“we are not convinced that the court is facing an imminent crisis”,

suggests to me that the Government are not grappling with this issue with the urgency that they should.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Boyd of Duncansby, explained how the delays in the Court are very damaging. If you look at the evidence on how long cases such as competition cases take to get resolved—33 months—that is not terribly satisfactory from anyone’s point of view. It is not satisfactory on grounds of efficiency and justice, nor does it happen to be in Britain’s national interest. We need an effective Court, as we need an effective Commission, to police the single market’s rules. Perhaps I may make an obvious point that is worth repeating again and again; there is a huge contradiction in the attitude of Eurosceptics towards the European Union. They say that they joined only a single market and that all they want is a single market, but they refuse to accept that the functioning of the single market depends on effective supranational institutions such as the Commission and the Court: that you cannot have one without the other. I would like the Government—I know that the pro-European half, or section, of the Government is facing me from the Front Bench—to feel that the whole of the Government recognise the truth of that argument: namely, that it is in Britain’s national interest to have an effective ECJ.

There are Members in the other place who have strong views about the ECJ. I was very alarmed to read that Mr George Eustice, in this new group of Eurosceptic Conservative Back-Benchers that was established, started talking about how in reality the European Court of Justice operates as a political court; that it has been out of control for far too long; and that it is time to clip its wings and to make it accountable to Parliament, as though it is normal that courts are accountable to politicians. That is the attitude in important sections of the governing party.

The fundamental reason why these sensible proposals are not being squarely addressed by the Government is because of this politics, which is getting into very dangerous territory. Some Members in the other place have attacked individual British Members. One attacked the British Advocate-General, Eleanor Sharpston, just because she happened to be, in their view, on the wrong side in the metric martyrs case. That kind of populist approach to the European Court is quite unacceptable. We need to see on the part of the Government a willingness to deal with these issues in the kind of objective manner that is in our national interest, as this report recommends. I commend the report to the House.