The European Court of Justice's Financial Accountability. How the European Parliament Incites and Monitors Judicial Reform through the Budgetary Process

This article deals with the European Court of Justice's (ECJ) financial accountability. It conceptualizes financial accountability, evaluates its practice and submits proposals for reform. It can thereby rely on, to date, unstudied, and partly unpublished documents from the EU budgetary process. The article puts forward three arguments. First, budgetary control of the ECJ has, since the early 2000s, developed into a powerful accountability mechanism. It allows the European Parliament to formulate concrete proposals on the management of the Luxembourg court and threaten (and potentially enforce) financial sanctions in case of non-compliance. Second, the ECJ's financial accountability, as practiced by the Parliament, is a mechanism that can contribute to framing the Court's power and enhancing its democratic legitimacy. This is due to the specific focus the Parliament has chosen and the dialogical relationship that has evolved. The Parliament does not employ the budgetary process for debating and reacting to the Court's judicial decisions, which would be problematic from the perspective of judicial independence. Rather, it lays the focus on how justice is done, i.e. on how the Court organizes the institution and conducts its procedures. However, third, the yardstick the Parliament has used to assess the Court's organization and procedure is ambivalent. The Parliament has put the concept of efficiency, i.e. the time taken for deciding a case, centre stage. Thereby, it has supported the Court in introducing reforms that have allowed addressing challenges to the Court's authority triggered by the enlargement of the Union in 2004 and 2007. However, through the sole focus on efficiency, the quality of the judicial process, notably procedural mechanisms that ensure participation and deliberation, have received scant attention