A NEW LEGAL ORDER, OR A NON-EXISTENT ONE? SOME (EARLY) EXPERIENCES IN THE APPLICATION OF EU LAW IN CENTRAL EUROPE

摘要

Summary: One of the mantras of European Community Law is thatwhich defi nes it as “[…] a new legal order of international law […]”. 1Like every mantra, this one has become a quasi-compulsory quote atthe opening of every other treatise on EC law. If we take the Van Gendstatement as our starting point, how is the “new legal order” doing inthe new Member States, some two years after accession?This paper consists of three parts. The fi rst part discusses current “European”case law in national courts, giving examples of the use of EClaw before domestic courts. Special attention is paid to cases which“made it to Luxembourg”, i.e. references for preliminary rulings from thenew Community courts. The second part of the paper focuses on threeparticular areas that are currently of great importance to the smoothapplication of EC law in the new Member States: issues concerning thetemporal application of EC law and inter-temporal arrangement; theproblem of the lack of due publication of EC law provisions in the languagesof the new Member States; and the question of who is supposedto be acquainted with, and raise points about, Community law before acourt. The third part of the paper makes some generalisations about thecurrent and future application of EC law in Central Europe.The focus of this paper is limited: our area of territorial analysis willbe the “Visegrad states”, i.e. the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic,Poland and Hungary.2 Of these four, the greatest attention will bepaid to the current situation in the Czech Republic.