Since the establishment, the Court of Justice of the European Union has a number of responsibilities and tasks. Its most important task is to ensure compliance with European regulations and a uniform interpretation of the European legal order. The Court ensures the effective and uniform application of Union law through the preliminary ruling procedure. Although many years have passed since the establishment of the European Community and all the judgments of the Court have a precedent effect, we still see an increasing trend in the number of these procedures. Several preliminary issues are also on the topic of free movement of goods every year.
In order for the free movement of goods to work, barriers which are usually divided into three categories must be removed: customs duties and charges having equivalent effect, quantitative restrictions and measures having equivalent effect and discriminatory internal taxes. What seems at first glance is very clear, in practice it turns out that this is not the case. In many cases, national legislation seems to be non-discriminatory and in line with Community law, but it has turned out that it actually distinguishes between domestic and imported products.
In this master's thesis, it is mainly analyzed on which group of obstacles the majority of preliminary questions are addressed, and from which countries the majority of procedures were submitted during the period under consideration - are these the founding, older or younger members.
Since all the preliminary procedures are collected and described in one place, it is clear from which narrower area the most questions arise. Thus, the profession will get an insight into which area it needs to focus on if it wants to reduce the number of procedures. For science, however, analysis by country of origin more interesting, as it is no not the youngest members who have submitted the most questions.
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