European Union law (EU law; European Union law) is a unique legal phenomenon formed in the course of development of European integration within the framework of the European Communities and the European Union, the result of implementation of supranational competence of the European Union institutions. European Union Law is a specific legal order, a legal system, which emerged at the junction of international law and domestic law of the European Union Member States, having independent sources and principles. The autonomy of European Union Law is confirmed by a number of decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Communities.
The term “Law of the European Union” is used since the early 1990s, with the advent of the European Union, before that established legal array was referred to as “the law of the European Communities”, “European Community law”, although the latter notion is not equivalent to the concept of “European Union law”. Some scholars see the concept of “European Union law” as synonymous with the broader concept of “European law,” used in a narrower sense.
The central link, the core of the law of the European Union and the law of the European Communities is the law of the European Community (EU law). The core, the supporting structure of EU law is the principles of EU law – the basic provisions of the most general nature that define the meaning, content, implementation and development of all other rules of EU law.
The principles of EU law are divided into functional and general principles of EU law. Functional principles include the principle of supremacy of EU law and the principle of direct effect of EU law. The principle of the supremacy of EU law means the priority of EU law over the norms of national legislation of member States, the norms of national law of member States must not contradict the norms of EU law. The principle of the direct applicability of EU law means the direct application of EU law in the territory of member States, the validity of Community law without any transformation into the legal order of a member State. These principles have been developed in the Court’s practice by interpreting the organization’s constituent instruments. General principles of the EU law include the principle of protection of individual rights and freedoms, the principle of legal certainty, the principle of proportionality, the principle of non-discrimination, the principle of subsidiarity, and a number of procedural principles.
European Union law has an original system of sources. The forms (sources) of EU law constitute an integral system of sources, with an inherent hierarchy of acts. The system of European Union law sources includes two groups of acts – primary law acts and secondary law acts.
Primary law acts include all the founding treaties of the European Union. By their legal nature, primary law acts are international treaties. The norms of primary law have higher legal force than all other norms of the European Union contained in secondary law.
The peculiarity of the European Union is that it is based on several international treaties of a constituent nature. First of all, this is the Treaty of Paris establishing the EEU in 1951, the Treaty of Rome establishing the EU in 1957, the Treaty of Rome establishing the Euratom in 1957, the Maastricht Treaty on European Union in 1992, the so-called “constituent treaties in the narrow sense”. These treaties are “constitutive” of the European Union. The “founding treaties in the broad sense” usually include all the aforementioned acts, as well as international treaties amending and supplementing them: the Brussels Treaty Establishing a Single Council and a Single Commission of the European Communities (Merger Treaty) of 1965, the Budget Treaty of 1970, the Budget Treaty of 1975, The Single European Act of 1986, the Treaty of Amsterdam amending the Treaty on European Union, the Treaties establishing the European Communities and a series of related acts of 1997. The Conference of the Member States, which ended in Nice on December 11, 2000, approved another set of amendments to the founding treaties of the Union (the Nice Treaty of 2001). These changes were finalized on February 14, 2001.
Secondary law acts include acts issued by the institutions of the Union, as well as all other acts adopted on the basis of founding treaties. In determining the sources of secondary law, we observe the clash of approaches to the understanding of sources in the continental and Anglo-Saxon legal families (recognition of jurisdictional acts as sources), as well as the influence of the concept of sources in international law.
The secondary law of the European Union has as its sources different categories of law-making forms. The first category of secondary law acts are normative acts, these include regulations, directives, framework decisions, general decisions of the EEU, recommendations of the EEU. The second category is individual acts, which include decisions (other than general decisions of the EEOC). The third category is recommendatory acts, which include recommendations (other than EEOC recommendations) and opinions. The next category of secondary law acts are the acts on the coordination of the Common Foreign and Security Policy, as well as the Police and Judicial Cooperation in Criminal Matters. This category of acts includes principles and common guidelines, common position, joint action, and common strategy. A separate category of acts are jurisdictional acts – decisions of the Court. Sources of secondary law include sui generis acts – “unofficial” forms of law, non-statutory acts issued by Union bodies (usually expressed as a decision of a particular body or resolution). The last category of secondary law sources can be designated as international acts, it includes decisions and acts of representatives of member states, conventions between member states concluded on the basis of constituent treaties, international treaties of the European Union.
The peculiarity of the European Union also determines the structural features of the law of the European Union. The structure of the law of the European Union consists of several interrelated elements. Elements of this structure are the founding treaties of the European Union, provisions on human rights and fundamental freedoms, rules adopted under the CFSP and the PCA, as well as the law of the European Communities.
In European Union law today there are trends of codification and improvement (Enforcement). The 2001 Laakene Declaration, adopted at the Summit of Heads of State/Government of the Member States in the European Council, emphasizes the need to reform the sources of primary and secondary law of the European Union, to simplify legal forms and to create, on the basis of the founding treaties of the European Union and the 2000 Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, a full-fledged constitution of the European Union.