Ursula von der Leyen. “It is a direct challenge to the unity of the European legal order.”
In a sense, she is right. The primacy of EU law is what turns a club of nations into a superstate. Take it away, and the EU becomes just one more international association like Nato, ASEAN or the Council of Europe.
Why, you might ask, did the member countries agree to this surrender? The answer is that they didn’t – at least, not until very recently. The primacy of EU law is not to be found anywhere in the Treaty of Rome.
It was invented, rather, by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in a series of controversial rulings which even committed federalists now admit amounted to a power-grab. In particular, two landmark cases in the 1960s – Van Gend en Loos and Costa vs ENEL – established that EU rulings were directly binding upon individuals and businesses within the member states, knocking aside any national legal acts that might contradict them.
For a long time, this blatant judicial activism went unacknowledged in the treaties. It was only in 2009, in a declaration attached to the Lisbon Treaty, that the member governments retroactively acknowledged the supremacy of EU law “in accordance with well settled case law of the ECJ”.
Daniel Hannan Telegraph 23 October 2021
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/10/23/poland-learning-britain-did-eu-will-never-let-members-sovereign/
"We must recover our legal sovereignty,” Michel Barnier told a rally last week.
“We should no longer be subject to rulings by the European Court of Justice or the European Court of Human Rights!”
Daniel Hannan, September 12th, 2021
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2021/09/we-must-recover-our-legal-sovereignty.html
